childcare with special needs

Childcare With Special Needs - Finding quality and affordable childcare has always been difficult for parents, but the situation has become more difficult in recent years. The current child care crisis stems from stagnant wages for child care workers, as well as closings and staff shortages due to the pandemic.

During the pandemic, about 10 percent of all childcare workers left the industry, and nearly 16,000 childcare centers were closed. As a result, there simply aren't enough childcare providers to meet the needs of families.

Childcare With Special Needs

Another troubling fact is that families with children with special needs are more likely to have difficulty finding care - or not to find it at all - than those with children without special needs.

Pact: Helping Children With Special Needs

Before the outbreak of the pandemic, more than half of Americans already lived in so-called "child care deserts," where the number of children under 5 years old exceeds the available child care options. When your child has a disability, finding child care in these areas becomes more difficult because it is harder to find the number of quality educators with experience with disabilities.

For Meagan Quigley of Illinois, whose son has autism and epilepsy, finding daycare so she can work and pay the bills is a challenge. Even when she does find quality care, those providers often don't stay long, causing more stress for both of them. "Any lack of consistency in his routine leads to more meltdowns, more challenges in regulating his emotions [and] more challenges for him even in school," he explained to Illinois Public Media.

An analysis by the Center for American Progress found that parents of children with special needs are also three times more likely to experience interruptions from work due to childcare issues.

Part of the problem are policies and sometimes physical barriers that prevent children with special needs from participating in certain activities. Each time this happens, parents are thrown into a frantic search for respite care, which can affect their employment.

Early Intervention For Disability & Autism

This in turn affects parents' willingness – or ability – to apply for promotion or pursue other avenues of development and education, leaving them feeling frustrated or stuck in what is not an acceptable position.

Being absent from work or avoiding working hours due to a lack of quality childcare can also affect a family's finances at a time when they are already struggling to meet the high costs associated with having a child. hard economic times. As a result, many parents report greater financial problems, more frequent health problems, and an overall increase in stress.

The researchers point to "years of chronic underinvestment" in the lack of quality child care crisis, adding that federal funding for child care has remained flat for more than 15 years.

By highlighting how much more complex the child care crisis is for families with children with special needs, the researchers urge policymakers to do more to implement practices and policies that ensure quality care is truly accessible to all. They say a progressive, flexible work-family policy would help all working parents better balance the childcare conundrum.

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After giving birth to premature twins, one of whom was disabled, Alexis began looking for childcare. She called day care providers several times to try to get places for her children. She found that it was almost impossible to find a center with two places for babies, especially for the disabled. Her partner, who works night shifts, spent a year looking after the twins during the day so Alexis could work. Even when Alexis' children became toddlers, her options remained limited: she had to eliminate all centers without elevators or ground-floor access due to one twin's physical disability. She is nervous and wary of service providers, who she fears might ignore a child who also has limited speech. At night, she and her partner lay in bed and "cry because it's just hard."

Alexis' experience is all too common for parents of children with special needs ages 0 to 5, a demographic that is estimated to make up 15 percent of the nation's youth population. Parents of children with special needs are more likely to have trouble finding child care, less likely to obtain child care and more likely to experience interruptions from work due to child care issues, according to a new report from the Center for American Progress. . Cristina Novoa, the report's author, interviewed Alexis and 16 other parents, whose last names have been withheld for privacy, and analyzed two national datasets on disability and child care. Novoa found that while many parents struggle to find quality childcare, the problem is particularly acute for parents of children with special needs. "They are facing additional barriers ... and paying an additional price," Novoa said. "It means families of children with special needs are really, really struggling."

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The report found that in 2016, 34 percent of parents of children with disabilities had trouble finding child care, compared to 25 percent of parents of children without disabilities, based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Often this is due to a lack of trained carers, inadequate physical accommodation and in some cases carers' bias or lack of interest in helping children with more complex needs. In areas where childcare options are already scarce, this can be crippling for parents. Thirty-four percent of parents of children with special needs could not find care in 2016, compared to 29 percent of parents with children without disabilities. Parents of children with special needs are more likely to combine multiple arrangements to find care and are more likely to rely on relatives.

Thirty-four percent of parents of children with special needs had problems finding care in 2016, compared to 25 percent of parents of children without disabilities. Source: National Center for Education Statistics

Some of the parents interviewed reported that they had run out of parental leave and paid sick days, and that they were exhausted and stressed by childcare issues. Almost 1 in 5 parents of children with special needs reported that they had quit work, not taken a job or made a significant change in their job because of child care, compared to almost 1 in 10 parents of young children in general. "These parents are loyal and they love their children very much and they don't see the child as a burden," Novoa said. But "they're not supported. They struggle a lot to get their kids into these programs."

To improve childcare options for parents of all children, especially those with children with special needs, Novoa recommends the following policy changes:

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Editor's note: This story first appeared in this week's Early Childhood Newsletter, delivered free to subscribers' inboxes every Wednesday with the trends and top early learning news.

The Hechinger Report provides all readers with in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education. However, this does not mean that the creation is free. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about important issues in schools and campuses across the country. We tell the whole story, even if the details are uncomfortable. Help us keep doing this.

Jackie Mader oversees all photo and multimedia use, covers early childhood education, and writes the early education newsletter. During her ten years at Hechinger, she covered a range of topics including teacher... More Jackie Mader

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