EDITOR'S NOTE: In October 2021 I began a new venture writing a newspaper column titled "Finding Faith" for the Forum Communications Co. network of newspapers and websites. I was asked to contribute to the company's ongoing conversation about faith, lending a Lutheran and fairly ecumenical approach to the discussion. The column was published in several of the company's papers and websites, including The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead. This column originally appeared as a "Finding Faith" column on Sept. 22, 2023.
By The Rev. Devlyn Brooks
If Mahatma Gandhi is correct, and societies should be measured by how they treat their most vulnerable members, then the coming months will be an opportunity for us to either dramatically increase or decrease our score.
Finding and paying for child care has never been easy; for example, in the 1960s and ‘70s, our mom had to farm out us kids to older siblings, friends and relatives so that she could work. But ask today's parents about their journeys finding child care, and you’d best prepare for a horror story, not a quaint children’s story.
Unaffordable, unavailable and unstable, today’s child care industry is in crisis, and would be in even worse condition if it hadn’t been propped up the last two years by federal funding included in the American Rescue Plan Act.
However, the funding wasn’t a permanent fix, and the $24 billion that was allocated for child care grants is set to run out at September’s end. So, according to The Century Foundation, an estimated 3.2 million children likely will lose their day care spots as the emergency federal funds dry up.
The implosion may not be immediate. But as parents struggle even more to afford daycare, and the assistance that kept child care programs open goes away, eventually millions of our youngsters will be without proper child care.
Consider this statistic alone: An estimated 77,000 child care programs nationwide eventually will close.
In our region, that means an estimated 10,229 kids will lose child care and 290 child care programs are expected to close in North Dakota; and in South Dakota, 14,655 kids are set to lose child care when 243 child care programs close. The projections in Minnesota, even starker: 70,763 kids are set to lose child care, while 2,741 child care programs shutter.
Of course, this is all if Congress doesn’t act to shore up our threadbare child care industry.
There is no one who isn’t touched by this crisis. And one doesn’t have to consider themselves a person of faith to see the dramatic effects that will cascade through society when the kiddos have nowhere to go.
However, if we do look at this looming crisis through a faith lens, there is ample scriptural evidence that it is our moral obligation to care for our society’s children, some of our most vulnerable members. Pick any number of scriptures, but I like 2 Corinthians 12:14: “… for children ought not to save up for their parents but parents for their children.”
Staving off the child care industry’s impending implosion is an opportunity for us to “save up” for our children, to invest in them … to demonstrate that we do care about our most vulnerable members.
And people of faith ought to concern themselves because we are called to do so. Amen.
Devlyn Brooks is an ordained pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and serves Faith Lutheran Church in Wolverton, Minn. He also works for Forum Communications Co. He can be reached at devlynbrooks@gmail.com for comments and story ideas.
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