Why doesn’t the US value child care? A historic look
The pandemic has laid bare the stunning paucity of opportunities for children and their parents a situation that’s brought financial and emotional disaster not just to American mothers, but to the U.S. economy
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Alfred Lubrano / The Philadelphia Inquirer | 7:00 am, May 12, 2021 ×
Mai Miksic works for Public Citizens For Children and Youth. COVID was a reckoning, she said. Jose F. Moreno / Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS
Child care ranked low on the list of jobs a mother had in 18th century colonial America.
What mattered more was survival. Wives and husbands toiled on farms, or in shops, and the work of bathing and feeding young ones fell to older children or other women, either enslaved or servants.