50 Time November 2/November 9, 2020
White House in December, though it stopped there.
But now a perfect storm has landed on the child-
care landscape, whipped up by the twin fronts of fear
and opportunity. Many parents, spooked by the po-
tential for COVID-19 infection at big centers, and
no longer necessarily commuting to work, are look-
ing for smaller, more local options for their children,
espe cially those that will take siblings of different
ages. Millennials, raised in the sharing economy, al-
ready regard domestic space as multipurpose. Teach-
ers like Schultz, alarmed by the prospects of either
teaching entirely online, or contagion in schools, are
looking for another way to work. People suddenly
need jobs. And governments and employers have
come to realize that without childcare, their work-
force is significantly less productive. The expensive
on-site office childcare centers sit empty while em-
ployees stagger under the double load of parenting
and working from home. Everyone’s looking for new
solutions.
These winds are buffeting a care system for the
youngest Americans that was already in disarray, and
childcare tech entrepreneurs believe they have the
solution. For a fee, they offer home-based carers help
with the tasks that algorithms do well, including pay-
roll, marketing, billing and scheduling. They provide
curricula, training webinars, mentorship and often a
kind of virtual teachers’ lounge, where providers can
mingle with others and kvetch or offer support, and a
path to licensure. They have search portals to match
parents and local providers. One of them, Wee-
Care, suggests that providers could make $100,000
a year: 300% more than the industry average.
While the pandemic has been hard on all provid-
ers, home-based centers have proved the most ro-
bust. The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) found that
childcare centers operating out of people’s homes
were the most likely of any type of provider to stay
open. More than a quarter of them continued oper-
ating without any interruption, while only 12% of
childcare chains kept functioning.
The representatives of the tech-based networks
talk about home-based childcare not as a last resort,
but as an artisanal, locally sourced amenity, childcare’s
version of Airbnb—that could also change the world.
“The continuity of care and this partnership that de-
velops between a provider who works with the child
for a couple of years and a parent, that’s the magic
of it,” enthuses Brian Swartz, one of the founders of
the Boston-based NeighborSchools. “We think this
is the model for the future of childcare in America.”
This has not been the way home day cares have
been regarded by many parents. “I was worried ini-
tially because of all the bad stories from social media
about in-home day care,” says Victoria Melanson,
who needed care for her 3-year-old son after the pan-
demic meant older relatives could no longer look after
him. Bigger chain centers were out of the family’s
price range, if they were open, so she went with a
home day care through NeighborSchools, and loves it.
These “carebnbs,” as they might be called, had
been around before SARS-CoV-2 arrived, but^
“I don’t want
parents to
see me as a
babysitter,”
says Schultz,
checking in
Liam Delgado,
2, while his
dad Matthew
holds him.
“I’ve worked
harder than
that and put in
years and years
and years of
teaching and
training.”