Why Universal Child Care is a Gender and Racial Justice Issue

Here’s what you need to know: 

• New York does not have universal child care or meaningful paid medical leave. Lack of these policies harms all families, and particularly women of color.
• Low-income parents, including child care workers themselves, are vulnerable to the damage that family regulation agencies like Child Protective Services inflict on parents and children. Yet these agencies oversee subsidized childcare programs. 
• Medical leave payments are far too low for people to care for their health needs, including during and after pregnancy.  
• As we work towards solutions such as universal child care and robust medical leave, we must center the needs of our most vulnerable families.  

Universal child care has been making headlines as of late, with Mayor Mamdani and Governor Hochul promising big developments as part of an affordability agenda.

Today’s soaring cost of living and staggering wealth inequality cast a spotlight on this longstanding need.  Too many families find themselves in an impossible predicament: They cannot afford to lose the wages they need to make ends meet, but they also can’t afford to pay for the child care that allows them to go to work. The average annual cost of unsubsidized child care in our state is $14,621, well out of reach for many New Yorkers.

Relatedly, without adequate paid medical leave, many New Yorkers are unable to take time off work to attend to their health, including during and after pregnancy.

These policies dictate who can and cannot afford to raise a family. They are fundamentally gender and racial justice issues that should be at the heart of any conversation about how to make New York an affordable place to live.

Paid Medical Leave

Growing a family can involve significant health risks. New Yorkers face a maternal health crisis in which Black women experience unconscionably high rates of maternal mortality – five times higher than their white peers.  People need time off work to attend to their health during pregnancy, cope with any complications, and recover if they experience a pregnancy or neonatal loss. But most people cannot take this time without losing wages or jeopardizing their job.

New York has a paid medical leave program called temporary disability insurance (TDI) to support people taking time off to tend to their own health, but it only provides workers with $170 dollars a week. This figure has not changed since 1989 and is woefully insufficient to survive in 2026. TDI also does not protect people from losing their jobs or their health insurance while they take time off.

The state’s inadequate support for people taking time away from work to care for themselves makes pregnancy more dangerous and taxing. It also makes parenting more precarious, as parents must choose between caring for themselves when they are ill or injured and the paycheck they need to support their family.

Universal Child Care

Eighty percent of New York households cannot afford unsubsidized child care. The average cost of child care in New York is 17 percent of the state median income – well over the seven percent of family income that the federal Health and Human Services Administration says is affordable.

Affording care can be even harder for Black households, whose median income was 36 percent lower than for white households as of 2024. Black women make only 66 cents on the dollar compared to white men, yet they are far more likely to be single parents with sole responsibility for financially supporting and caring for their children. This puts them in an especially untenable position where they must work but cannot afford child care.

While New York State has made significant investments in child care in recent years, the current patchwork of tax breaks and subsidies leaves child care out of reach for far too many families. More than half of New York counties have had to cut off enrollment in the state’s child care assistance program because they ran out of funds. In New York City, there are currently more than 17,000 children on the waitlist.

Those who can access the vouchers may be subject to minimum earnings requirements, meaning they must work to be eligible for child care assistance. This creates a catch-22 for parents, who cannot access child care without employment, but who cannot commit to employment until they know they will have child care.

The Family Regulation Trap

Amidst the child care crisis, communities of color are also heavily policed by the family regulation system. Dubbed the “New Jane Crow,” the family regulation system surveils and punishes mostly Black and Brown mothers for circumstances related to poverty, like the criminal legal system does to Black men.

If a parent who cannot access affordable child care leaves their child unattended in order to go to work, they could face investigation by Child Protective Services (CPS) and consequences as severe as permanently having their children taken away.

On the flip side, parents who spend precious income on child care at the expense of other household needs, like food or rent, may also be investigated and prosecuted by CPS for what the law deems “neglect,” but is often simply poverty.

Perversely, early childhood educators, who are disproportionately women and people of color and who earn roughly half the median annual salary of New York workforce, struggle to afford care for their own children. A Department of Labor analysis found that an early childhood educator in New York State would have to spend 62 percent of their annual pay to place their own infant in a daycare center.

This dynamic ensures that the same people entrusted to care for other people’s children are among those most likely to be targeted by the family regulation system for allegedly failing to care for their own children.

Once the family regulation system ensnares them, parents are listed on the State Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment, which can make them ineligible for jobs working with children. Thus, a CPS investigation can cause a parent to lose their job as an early childhood educator, thrusting their family deeper into poverty.

To add insult to injury, the same state and local agencies that oversee CPS are typically responsible for child care vouchers and enrollment. Parents in communities heavily impacted by the family regulation system deeply fear these agencies, yet we ask them to entrust their children to the same entities charged with investigating them and possibly taking their children away.

These policies further entrench the race and gender inequality at the heart of today’s affordability crisis.

A Lack of Support for Caregiving Fuels Sexism and Racism

It’s no coincidence that the lack of structural support for caregiving harms women – and women of color especially. Sexism and racism are baked into policy design to intentionally deny power to women and communities of color.

The low pay of today’s early childhood educators reflects centuries of such work being overlooked and devalued. This work was delegated to women and women of color in part because of their low social status, and their low social status was reinforced by doing this work – a never-ending cycle.

When President Richard Nixon in 1971 vetoed bi-partisan legislation passed by Congress that would have created universal, federally-subsidized child care, in part “to cement the family in its rightful position as the keystone of our civilization,” he reinforced unpaid caregiving as women’s responsibility.

Conservative activists urged Nixon to block the legislation to keep pressure on women to remain out of the workforce and home with their children. By denying public support for child care, Nixon also guaranteed that low-income, Black, and Brown women who could never afford not to work would continue to struggle to care for their children and make ends meet.

Lawmakers tightened this bind on low-income families in the 1990’s, when, spurred by racist stereotypes, they both gutted social safety nets and imposed stringent work requirements on public benefits recipients. This ensured an ongoing need for child care by those who could afford it least.

Today, conservatives would still like to push women out of the public sphere and back into the home. Although women now make up 47 percent of the workforce, they are still more likely than men to reduce their hours or leave their jobs to care for children when they cannot afford child care.

While women have largely moved beyond the role of homemaker, our institutions have failed to keep up – they are still designed for either full-time workers or full-time parents, putting families with young children in an exhausting and precarious bind.

Solutions Exist, But They Require Commitment

When it comes to paid medical leave, New York already has a model for a better policy. The 2018 paid family leave law allows workers who need to take leave to care for a new child or a sick or injured family member to receive 67 percent of their average weekly wage and does include job protection and continued health insurance.

Yet in a twist of pure cruelty, a person who experiences pregnancy loss is only eligible for the meager paid medical leave’s $170/week for their recovery – not the paid family leave they would have received if their pregnancy resulted in a live birth. By the same callus logic, their spouse is eligible for paid family leave to care for them.

New York must extend the benefits of the paid family leave program to people who need to take time off to care for themselves. This change would allow families to stay afloat financially when one member has health needs that prevent them from working.

On the universal child care front, Gov Hochul and Mayor Mamdani have proposed sweeping and unprecedented investments this year. These include a $1.7 billion increase in funding towards expanding universal pre-k across the state, fixing New York City’s 3K program, creating a 2K program in New York City, and expanding access to subsidized care statewide. These proposals are laudable, but they are still incomplete.

In the short term, families urgently need child care vouchers to help them afford care, which requires an even greater influx of funding. We must also fund the essential labor of the child care workforce. It is unjust to continue to expect women of color, many of whom are parents themselves, to perform caregiving work for poverty wages.

And without investing in the child care workforce, the state will not be able to expand capacity to fully meet the demand for care. The state must bridge the gap between what child care providers are able to pay early childhood educators and what these workers deserve. We must also disentangle child care from the family regulation agencies that many families, especially Black and Brown ones, have good reason to fear.

New Yorkers need a truly universal system in which access to child care does not depend on income, geography, employment, disability, or immigration status. As New York builds the infrastructure for this new system, we must prioritize the needs and experiences of New York’s most marginalized families.