From Raytown to 51st Street to Fourth Street in Kansas City. That’s the commute Chelawnta Lewis and her husband make every day to get their kids to their early childhood care programs.
Lewis already had two children under the age of 2 when she learned she was pregnant during the COVID-19 pandemic. She wanted to keep the kids home until kindergarten but needed more support, so she enrolled all three in early education services.
Some facilities have age restrictions, so her sons had to attend different Head Start locations. A private option was a better fit for her daughter, but the couple could only afford to send one child there.
“I had three children at three different centers learning three different things, and it was quite chaotic,” Lewis said.
That’s just one of the challenges that Kansas City area families face when raising young kids.
A new report from Kids Win Missouri and IFF, a nonprofit development institution, found nearly 32,000 infant and toddler child care slots are needed in the Kansas City region. Nearly 6,000 prekindergarten spots are also needed.
Casey Hanson, the deputy director of Kids Win Missouri, said the dearth of available child care exists for a multitude of reasons, including staffing challenges and the rising cost to provide quality care.
Hanson said navigating early education options can also strain families' pocketbooks and mental load. Other parents have to sit out of the workforce altogether to care for their child.
“Parents have lost income, and even just their productivity is lost because they're dealing with this issue of child care,” Hanson said.
KCUR spoke with several parents about their challenges in finding child care in Kansas City and what could be done to better support them.
Disparities in discipline
The YMCA of Greater Kansas City closed its four area Head Start centers over staffing issues last year, leaving Lewis scrambling to find another care facility for her two sons.
Lewis sent both sons to a private care location, but in just a month, she said she started to see discipline issues.
In the area’s Head Start programs, she was used to staff being trained in a method called Conscious Discipline that teaches adults how to self-regulate their emotions so they can better model them for children.
At her sons’ new care facility, Lewis said students could be suspended and expelled if they didn’t heed previous warnings and visits to the principal's office. Lewis said offenses included not raising their hand, talking out of turn, running in line, hitting and biting.
Lewis said the center’s discipline policy didn’t work for her son who has sensory needs and frequently needs to run, flip or bearcrawl. She and her husband ultimately decided to pull both sons out and teach them from home before enrolling them at a Head Start program at Guadalupe Centers.
She also was part of a group of parents with the Parent Leadership Training Institute who organized Raising KC: Family Perspectives on Early Care and Education, a photoseries sharing experiences in early care and education.
Lewis learned through research for the project that Black and brown boys are more likely to be disciplined — even in preschool.
“I have this mindset for my boys that they won't grow up thinking they're bad Black boys, or that they're doing anything wrong for being themselves,” Lewis said. “I had to protect them.”
Lewis said a solution for disparities in early care discipline would be to get child care providers together and have them work on policies that work for individual children and that are appropriate for their age, not just a cookie-cutter approach.
Lewis and other Raising KC parents asked local leaders to sign a pledge supporting investment in early care and removing barriers for families trying to access it. She said having access to care made a difference in her life and allowed her to start a business.
“I'm better now because of it so just imagine all of the families who could be better because they have the access to care and they can really dive into the things that look like purpose for them,” Lewis said.
Affording early education
When Megan Nickell became a foster parent, she knew she’d also need early child care.
But finding it was difficult. Waitlists at facilities are a challenge for many families looking for child care, but fostering means a child could be placed in a home with little notice.
“It was really disheartening trying to find a day care that had openings that would take the state subsidy that the foster care provided and would again be accepting of, ‘Hey, I have a kid, and I need them to start day care as soon as possible,’” Nickell said.
Without the state subsidy, she said it wouldn’t have been possible for her to adopt her three children. She works full-time but with the three so close in age, she said it would cost nearly $60,000 a year for early education.
As a single mom, having her children in day care is her only option while she works. She has a “village” in Kansas City to support her, but none that can care for her kids full-time. Despite having a well-paying job, she said she wouldn’t have been able to afford early care for all three children.
The report from Kids Win Missouri and IFF found families are paying 14% or more of their income to cover the cost of care. That’s double the amount that the federal government considers affordable for a household.
She said if people in Kansas City had access to financial support for child care like her family has, more would be willing to start families or careers. But she also says being in early education has been “life changing” for her children.
“I saw the benefits my kids had, being able to have that access, and I feel like every kid in Kansas City deserves that,” she said.
More workplace flexibility
Christina Anderson’s son starting kindergarten was a transition for them both. While he worked on his reading and social skills, she navigated applications and which school to send him to.
But Anderson also had to figure out lining up her work schedule with her son’s schooltimes as a single mom. That’s a challenge because his school doesn’t offer before-school care.
“I really have to hone into my village of my parents, my friends, just to help navigate who's doing the pickup, who's doing the drop-off,” Anderson said.
When her son was younger, Anderson said she was fortunate a family member had a home-based child care business. Otherwise, she said, she wouldn’t be able to afford day care because she makes too much for any state subsidies, but not enough to afford the cost of care.
Now, Anderson takes jobs that work with her 6-year-old son's school schedule. She’s had to turn down two positions because they wouldn't have allowed her to.
The Kids Win Missouri and IFF report found more than three-fourths of surveyed parents have left the workforce, reduced their hours, switched jobs, changed schedules, started to work from home, or moved to a new home to accommodate child care.
Anderson wants hours for child care to be more flexible for working parents, but also wants workplaces to be more accommodating to parents. Her current workplace offers paid time off, but not all do.
“You have to understand as an employer, what does that look like to be a present parent, and how that flexibility needs to be to be present, and how those two go together,” Anderson said. “Affordability of child care and working in a corporate America, those two things have to go together.”
Helping parents through difficult times
Kimberly, who KCUR is identifying only by her first name to protect her privacy, said it was easier to navigate raising young children with her first kid because she had the support of her then-husband.
But Kimberly said it’s been a challenge while she and her two children heal from divorce and domestic violence. Shelters were full and she’s had to stay with family, but the risk of homelessness is never completely gone.
Right now, she’s staying with her sister and relying on food assistance while she gets back on her feet. In the meantime, she’s her kids' sole education.
“I'm their mom, I am their advocate, I am their teacher, I am everything for them so I am the stability that they have,” she said. “We are not in an ideal situation right now; however, I know that within myself, we have it within us to move forward.”
Kimberly is working on receiving more education so she can move into a new career. Her EMS license expired because she couldn’t afford to renew it, but she wants to reenter the health care field.
She needs child care for her kids so she can work, and found a state program that helps pay for that care. But Kimberly said there are a limited number of months that the state will cover before she'll have to start paying, so she's waiting to enroll her children until she finds a job.
She wants people in power to see the situation that she was thrown into and look for ways to help so that nobody else has to go through what she has.
She also wants people who are going through domestic violence and having to parent alone know there is hope.
“Because it is possible to get out of these situations, and it's not without state help, but it is important for you to advocate for yourself and for your kids to get out of that,” she said.
