When Jessica Desarden, 32, became a mother seven years ago, one of her concerns was finding the appropriate day care to look after her children when she went back to work.
Desarden, a nurse living in the Belmont Cragin area, said she quickly realized there were not many child care centers near her home.
“Good child care that’s affordable is not very easily found around here,” she said on a recent weeknight after work.
Luckily, Desarden was referred to a center that is affordable and close to home, where she now drops off her 4-year-old while her 7-year-old is at school.
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However, many parents haven’t been as fortunate.
When the pandemic forced many day care centers across the city to close, it created a hardship for many local families and added even more difficulty to some who had already faced a tough time finding care in their communities.
Child care challenges in predominantly Latino Chicago communities were noted in a recent University of Chicago Chapin Hall report. The report showed that 86% of Latino families in Illinois live in child care deserts.
Researchers spoke to child care center directors and 32 Latina mothers who live in Belmont Cragin on the Northwest Side and Little Village on the West Side with at least one child under age 5. Mothers said they wanted more child care information and cited barriers such as access (bilingual resources are not always available), cost and convenience. Little Village moms said there were not many programs near their homes. Belmont Cragin moms shared their experiences of being waitlisted or referred elsewhere.
The researchers did not screen participants based on gender but ultimately interviewed solely mothers, who often are the main caregivers in Latino families. Researchers asked questions about family perspective and wanted to reflect Latino family experiences as a whole. Of the 32 mothers surveyed, 22 used some form of nonparental child care, including pre-K and community-based programs, or a relative who watched children.
Finding child care a parent trusts requires much time and effort. Moms asked neighbors or friends or searched online for info. Some found information from fliers at community centers or a posting from a friend at church. Like many parents, they considered logistics, safety and the specific needs of their children.
While the parent interviews were recorded between 2018 and 2019, researcher Aida Pacheco-Applegate said COVID-19 has only amplified the challenges. The study notes how the pandemic has laid bare what communities of color already face: health disparities.
She said they embarked upon this research after realizing there was a lack of data on Latino communities. Although the challenges may be similar to those of parents in other communities, Latino families also may have the added stressors of language barriers or legal status.
“They don’t have information about the options they have,” she said.
Through her role as a parent mentor at her son’s school, Ana Barron, 30, a Belmont Cragin mom with a 7-year-old son and infant daughter, often talks with other parents about child care, which she said, in Spanish, is “the iceberg of all the issues and needs in our community.”
Even before the pandemic, many parents were forced to leave their children in the care of family members and, sometimes, even depend on their older children to take care of the younger ones, Barron said. “That’s a common practice within the Latino community, because a day care is not affordable nor accessible,” she said.
Parents know, she added, that leaving their children with older kids isn’t ideal, but have no other options.
The pandemic exacerbated child care needs because many parents could not leave their children with their grandparents or other older adults, whom they often lean on, for fear of spreading the virus.
And since the COVID-19 pandemic hit the Chicago area, even parents who had managed to access and pay for child care in the past, were forced to find an alternative, leave work or cut their hours because they couldn’t enroll their kids due to a cap on the number of kids allowed, Barron said.
“COVID-19 made matter worse,” said Mayra Lemos, 28, a single mother of two who works as a cashier at a grocery store near her home in Belmont Cragin. Since the pandemic hit, her mother and sister help her to take care of her 9-year-old daughter and her 4-year-old son.
Lemos, who has been working since she had her first child, said she relied on her mother for help to take care of her daughter because she could not afford and did not trust home day cares in the area. When her second child was born, she decided to seek a child care center to alleviate the burden on her family, but after a while, she didn’t feel comfortable leaving her son.
Around her home, she said, there are plenty of home day cares but few child care centers. Many have hours that do not correlate with her work hours. Ideally, she said, she would like to have more child care centers with trained caretakers where she can feel comfortable leaving her children.
Prepandemic, she was able to take her daughter to school while she was at work and only had to worry about the needs of her son. However, now Lemos worries that her mother cannot help her son with e-learning. She wonders what she would do without her mother and sister.
“It worries me because if I can’t find someone to take care of them, how would I work to provide for them?” she said. “It’s hard; it is all a sacrifice.”
The Chapin Hill report noted a disparity in options. For example, in Belmont Cragin, there were 13 licensed centers and 62 licensed family child care homes — a total of 6,695 slots. But despite having a similar population, Little Village had just five licensed centers and 19 licensed family child care homes — a total of 1,886 slots. These numbers don’t include unlicensed or license-exempt homes.
Finding a place parents trusted was paramount.
“Those things are super important to them,” Pacheco-Applegate said. “But then, because of the lack of information, and they don’t know how these programs work, some of them didn’t trust these programs.”
Even when people found child care centers, barriers included a lack of transparent information about cost, and public programs with complex eligibility requirements.
Some parents assume that child care is too expensive or that they would not qualify for financial assistance. Financial options vary. One child care program had an emergency fund offering families up to $500; another offered a scholarship program where families can enroll while they look for work.
Pacheco-Applegate said more parents could benefit from the state Child Care Assistance Program, which can offset costs. Many mothers said their family income was just above the threshold to qualify, or would be if they worked. The report suggests raising income eligibility limits for two-parent households.
Particularly for parents paid in cash, providing proof of work and income can be intimidating. And day care directors said that after the 2016 election, enrollment declined as undocumented parents feared sharing their status.
To help bridge the gap of information and affordability for families, researchers recommend Chicago provide more options in communities that need them and universal pre-K programs.
Many mothers suggested a community guide. Libraries, home visiting programs and health clinics could feature information in directories, the report suggested, which should be regularly updated and bilingual. Hiring child care workers from within the neighborhood could alleviate safety concerns; so could outreach to parents, or offering open houses.
In the report, the moms interviewed confirmed the importance that families place on parental care, a feeling that mothers should be home with young children. Even when mothers wanted to work outside the home, some said it wouldn’t be worth it because their wages would go to child care.
“I don’t think anybody really makes the decision like, I’m gonna stay at home or I’m gonna work,” a Little Village mother told researchers. “It’s like, I have to stay at home ‘cause I can’t afford to be at work and pay for child care, or I have to work ‘cause I can’t afford not to work.”
In many Latino families, multiple family members live together, so grandparents help with child care. Or they might use another family member, friend or neighbor. But Pacheco-Applegate said that still, they found even if parents did not send children to day care, they wanted the option.
“We found that, actually, no, they want to put their kids in child care,” Pacheco-Applegate said. “They want kids to improve their social skills, to hang out.”