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the virus has made their business more relevant.
WeeCare, the biggest of the networks, had 600 day-
care providers signed up in December, almost all
in California. As of October, it has 2,700 providers
across 25 states. Wonderschool, which started in
2017 and got a $20 million injection of funds from
investors led by Andreessen Horowitz a year later,
now has 1,000 centers. Interest from parents has
skyrocketed, especially for those centers that are
outdoors, sometimes known as forest schools. Both
NeighborSchools and MyVillage have expanded their
geographic reach during the pandemic, and several
platforms have started partnerships with businesses
looking to help their employees.
Ask Any pArent about the U.S. childcare system,
and you can settle in for a long and exasperated de-
tailing of the parlous state of affairs. “In my city, there
are not a lot of options that are affordable but high-
quality,” says Mike Schmorrow, a lumberman from
Gloucester, Mass. He didn’t qualify for any childcare
subsidies, “even though if I were to pay the full retail
price, I wouldn’t be able to afford to live.” He ended
up sending his son to a home-based day care half an
hour away, which charged him $100 for two days.
On the other end of the income spectrum, Jessica
Chang, who founded WeeCare, was so confounded
by finding care that she bought and operated three
preschools herself before building the online child-
care marketplace. “Preschools don’t scale,” she says.
In many ways, childcare in a local person’s home
is one of the most ancient and global infant-rearing
practices we have. Mothers have been leaving their
children with trusted and experienced neighbors
since people first started to gather in villages. But
perhaps because the work has always been done by
women—and, in America, women of color—it does
not attract the respect that might logically be ac-
corded to people who nurture our newest beings.
According to Home Grown, a national organi-
zation that advocates for home-based care centers,
sometimes called family childcare centers or in-home
childcare, there are about 1.12 million paid carers
who work in their homes, of whom only 7%—some
86,309—are fully licensed. These are the ones whose
numbers have been dropping the fastest; more than
a fifth of them have closed in the past six years. This
decline, experts agree, is one of the prime drivers of
the increasing number of what are called childcare
deserts: areas where the demand for childcare vastly
exceeds the supply.
It’s not quite clear why the home day-care sector
has shrunk. Linda Smith of the BPC believes retir-
ing providers are not being replaced. Chang says she
found “a significant disconnect between millenni-
als who are now the parents and the baby boomers
who were all the providers. Many of them didn’t have
websites... or even any reviews online.”
But nearly everyone suggests it’s simply because
the work is hard and the rewards and respect are
low. Most home-based day-care providers’ jour-
ney to profitability is not as smooth as Schultz’s.^
Hassan
Albayati,
3, smiles at
another child
while they
wait for snack
time. The most
unexpected
part of running
the center,
says Schultz,
has been “the
insane amount
of diapers I
have to change
on a daily
basis.”