Don't use our kids as props for your ‘family-friendly' theater
Students play on the playground at Woodrow Wilson Elementary School in South Salt Lake on Tuesday, March 12, 2024. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
Our state leaders love to tell anyone who will listen that Utah is a 'family-friendly' state. We are the youngest state in the nation! We have the biggest families! We love kids!
But actions, not words, show whether our leaders truly care about the stability and success of Utah families. Recently, legislative leaders have shown their 'love' of kids by promoting dental decay, eroding public schools, and ostracizing immigrant children.
And for another consecutive year, they did not show any love for the tens of thousands of working families statewide who need and deserve relief from Utah's ongoing child care crisis.
It's clear that our state leaders don't 'love' the idea of helping children who do (or could) benefit from the early care and learning offered through licensed child care programs. Instead, they have undermined the health and safety of kids in child care settings, made no substantial public investment to help parents afford rising child care costs, and belittled child care professionals with decades of expertise.
State leaders' coordinated response to our child care crisis is clear: create the illusion of doing something while actually doing as little as possible. Their strategy certainly crystallized this past legislative session, as the child care bills state leaders allowed to pass contained only superficial efforts to address Utah's very real child care challenges.
The governor and Legislature cannot claim ignorance or lack of knowledge. They have all the information they need to meaningfully address the frustration and desperation of working families with young kids. They just can't be bothered to use it.
In December, the Women in the Economy Subcommittee of Gov. Spencer Cox's Unified Economic Opportunity Commission released a 'Utah Childcare Solutions and Workplace Productivity Plan.' In appreciation, legislative leaders scrapped the subcommittee altogether. Nonetheless, the plan does exist and could be incredibly helpful.
Completed by early care and education experts, it includes current data about our changing demographics, the financial struggles of parents with young children, and the challenges facing the child care workforce. The plan confirms the severity of Utah's child care situation, which local advocates have warned about for years.
Most importantly, the plan contains 33 common-sense solutions that have succeeded all over the country. The recommendations are vetted by early childhood experts with decades of expertise and formulated to specifically address Utah's child care challenges … and essentially ignored by the same legislature that paid for the plan.
In fact, the erstwhile co-chair of the Women in the Economy Subcommittee — Rep. Karianne Lisonbee, R-Clearfield — admitted to local media that she hadn't even read the plan (but definitely 'intended to' at some point). But why read through an 84-page policy document full of child care solutions, when you know you won't do anything it recommends?
Grassroots child care champions are beyond frustrated with politicians who deliver annual performances celebrating the preciousness of hypothetical children, while doing next to nothing to help actual Utah kids. With so much information and expertise available to them, they still refuse to act.
Everyday Utahns who care about this issue are willing to do their part. There are plenty of local experts, parents and child care providers, who are highly informed and almost entirely unpaid. Unfortunately, there is no avenue for them to engage in a legitimate problem-solving process with their elected representatives.
Imagine being a working parent or child care provider, taking time off from your job to share your personal experience with an issue impacting thousands of families … only to deliver your carefully crafted two-minute testimony to legislators who are staring at their phones or telling unprofessional, insensitive jokes. Or, think about persistently trying to offer your lived experience expertise, for free, only to never be included as a stakeholder when child care legislation is written.
Thankfully, state leaders didn't create new challenges for the child care sector this past session. They just did very little to address the existing ones. Once again, they've done just enough to maintain their 'child-friendly' public image while helping as few Utah children as possible.
Utah is very lucky to have thousands of caring parents and child care professionals, still willing to do this incredibly meaningful work for little to no pay. But the luck can't — and won't — last, while Utah's kids end up paying dearly for state leaders' hypocrisy.
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