An Invisible Child Care Challenge

Desiree, a mother of three who lives near Santa Rosa, California, starts work at a local HVAC supply company every morning at 4:30. While she doesn’t mind the predawn start, it does pose one big challenge, especially now that she has a newborn: child care. The nearby child care center that offers subsidized prices doesn’t open until 7:30 a.m., and that “isn’t working for” her family.

Desiree has a problem on the other end, too—children can’t stay at the center for more than nine hours, but the finishing time of her shift is inconsistent and once or twice a month she has to stay as late as 6 p.m. While she is currently on maternity leave, if she can’t find an affordable program that matches her hours, Desiree told us over text, “I would probably end up having to ask my job to change my hours … and if they can’t work with me or aren’t hiring for a later shift I would probably be forced to look for a different job.”

Child care policy conventionally focuses on the cost, availability, and quality of care options. By focusing on the provision of childcare instead of the more holistic ecosystem of family life, however, this approach misses all of the variables that go into parents’ decisions about care. In a broader sense, the misalignment is symptomatic of America’s lack of a comprehensive family policy: Schedule quality is a powerful force shaping how families engage with care, yet because labor policy and child care policy are seen as separate arenas, the nexus goes largely unaddressed.

That’s a problem, because millions of Americans have inadequate job schedules. In 2025, a group of research institutions and Gallup published the “American Job Quality Study.” The team broke scheduling quality into three components: predictability (knowing one’s schedule at least two weeks in advance, or being able to set it if not), stability (total weekly hours don’t fluctuate by more than 25 percent in a month, unless the employee is choosing it), and control (having input into how many hours they work, what days they work, and when they can take a few hours off). The researchers concluded that, “Overall, about one in four U.S. employees face schedule unpredictability and instability, and about four in 10 have little or no control over their work schedules.” This is reflected in the parent population as well: A recent YouGov survey commissioned by the think tank Capita (for which we work) found that among parents with minor children, a quarter had a shift canceled, shortened, or extended in the previous month with less than 24 hours’ notice.

Unsurprisingly, the distribution of low-quality schedules concentrates among lower-income households and certain job sectors. Among retail and fast-food workers, as many as two-thirds don’t know their schedules two weeks in advance, and they are frequently subject to abrupt schedule changes, canceled shifts, and being called in at the last minute. Jobs with low-quality schedules are also commonly jobs with nontraditional hours—early mornings, nights, or weekends—which poses a layered set of care challenges. In Desiree’s case, she has a generally predictable schedule, but can’t find a child care provider in her area that matches her early hours.

Indeed, having a low-quality job schedule makes it nearly impossible to utilize licensed child care programs. Most formal programs understandably require that parents sign up for full-time slots or, if part-time, send their children on the same days each week. Similarly, scraping to pay for a child care slot is not viable when your shift might be canceled or your monthly income swings wildly. Variable monthly income can also result in parents losing public child care assistance when they have a month with too much income or a month where they don’t meet minimum hours requirements. Even free, federally funded programs like Head Start have attendance expectations, so if wonky schedules result in parents being unable to drop off their child enough, they may unintentionally forfeit their child’s slot. 

Instead, research from Harvard University’s Shift Project suggests that parents with low-quality schedules rely on a grab-bag of strategies. If a family member like a grandparent is available, that person is frequently tapped. If that’s not an option and there are two parents in the household, parents may choose to “ladder” their schedules, where they intentionally take opposite shifts so one is able to be home with the children. And when that’s not an option, parents fall into what scholars have termed “a child-care scramble.” All of this, of course, introduces enormous strain into parents’ already stressful lives, and acute chronic stress is correlated with mental health challenges, bad sleep, poor parenting practices, and the dissolution of marriages. This cocktail of precarity also decreases families’ ability to engage in communal and civic life, and reduces societal trust even further in our disconnected age, making it that much harder to build a web of informal care relationships. 

While some families are lucky enough to have a beloved family member nearby capable of providing regular care, mercurial care arrangements are generally not a great setup for young children. Children develop best with reliable and consistent caregivers, whether parents, kin, or trusted child care providers. The child care scramble can also be downright dangerous, with parents at times forced to leave children with slightly older siblings or barely known adults in ways that can spike the risk for child maltreatment or even death.

What parents need, then, is control over their schedules.

There is a solution: fair workweek policies. These laws, broadly speaking, require large employers (such as national chains) to provide scheduling certainty two weeks in advance, limit last-minute shift changes as well as retaliation for requesting or declining a shift change, and offer employees some type of compensation if shifts are abruptly canceled or reduced. The first one was passed in San Francisco in 2014, and they have since expanded to many major cities such as Los Angeles, New York City, and Chicago, as well as the state of Oregon. One such policy in Emeryville, California, has been shown to reduce scheduling instability among parents with young children by 35 percent, and improved parents’ sleep, stress levels, and overall happiness. While the devil is, as always, in the details—some possible issues include enforcing these laws, educating workers about their rights, and avoiding employer manipulation—this is a promising area for public policy innovation.

While most fair workweek policies have been passed in Democratic-led jurisdictions, improving the quality of job schedules need not be a partisan fight. Fair workweek laws have been in place long enough for researchers to judge their impact, and none of the feared negative labor market impacts have emerged. The key reframe is to stop thinking of fair workweek policies as yet another battleground between labor and management, and to start thinking of them as core elements of an economy that works for families.

Fair workweek laws can also help with another notoriously precarious arrangement: part-time work. In recent years, many large companies have turned part-time work into a trap, maintaining a large group of part-timers who they won’t allow to cross the 30-hour-a-week threshold that would allow those workers to receive benefits like health insurance. These part-time workers often have highly unsteady arrangements: Per the American Job Quality Study, more than one-third of part-time workers report low-quality schedules, versus only a quarter of full-time workers. Some fair workweek laws also include “access to hours” provisions. These vary in specifics but generally require companies to offer more hours to existing part-time employees prior to hiring new staff to cover those hours. A recent proposal from the People’s Policy Project, a left-leaning think tank, went further and suggested giving employees of larger companies a legal right to a full-time schedule.

Of course, the part-time trap not only harms workers who want to go above 30 hours, it also harms those individuals who desire a part-time role—like the multitude of parents for whom part-time work allows for an ideal balance between job and family. In addition to fair workweek requirements, other countries like the Netherlands have addressed this through laws that require part-time employees receive pro-rated benefits based on the proportion of full-time hours they work, and equivalent hourly compensation when they are performing the same job as full-time workers.

Any child care reform conversation should thus include a fair workweek lens—in addition to more investment in child care during non-traditional hours—while any conversation about schedule predictability or part-time work should include a discussion on how families with children are affected. Until that happens, scheduling chaos will continue to drag millions of American families down.

This piece was produced in partnership with New America’s Better Life Lab.