I read this article the day it was published, and I’ve been thinking about it all week. In fact, I think about this topic constantly because elevating the importance of child care has been my life’s work. Currently, I am leading a workforce innovation strategy for a large school age child care company. I have two thoughts I want to add:
1. Care work has to be an economically viable job for more people to want to do it (crucial to elevating the brand is creating more demand for a workforce). I’m a subscriber to Anne Helen Peterson’s Substack, Culture Study, and in one of her open community threads she asked a question like, “What job would you do if Universal Basic Income existed?” I was shocked to see how many respondents specified care work. They wanted to be pre-school teachers, infant and elder care workers, and teachers, but they felt they could not achieve their life goals in those jobs. It’s not that people don’t want to care for others. In fact, we are wired to care for others. It’s that it doesn’t provide the pay and benefits that people need. We have to solve for the pay (fix the broken business model of child care) first. If the brand’s value proposition is that child care is essential to the fabric of society, we have to put our money where our mouth is, so we can deliver on the promise.
2. Something I’m thinking about a lot is our AI-enabled future, and which jobs will become irrelevant and which jobs more important. As many jobs become automated, it seems we have both a need for more people to do the care work that can’t be done by AI (due to our aging population), and a world where many more people may need jobs. It seems this could be the impetus for re-orientating the brand of child care. There was a time when we were all excited about teaching kindergartners how to code, and now AI has replaced that need. How might we work toward a society with care work at the center?
I read this article the day it was published, and I’ve been thinking about it all week. In fact, I think about this topic constantly because elevating the importance of child care has been my life’s work. Currently, I am leading a workforce innovation strategy for a large school age child care company. I have two thoughts I want to add:
1. Care work has to be an economically viable job for more people to want to do it (crucial to elevating the brand is creating more demand for a workforce). I’m a subscriber to Anne Helen Peterson’s Substack, Culture Study, and in one of her open community threads she asked a question like, “What job would you do if Universal Basic Income existed?” I was shocked to see how many respondents specified care work. They wanted to be pre-school teachers, infant and elder care workers, and teachers, but they felt they could not achieve their life goals in those jobs. It’s not that people don’t want to care for others. In fact, we are wired to care for others. It’s that it doesn’t provide the pay and benefits that people need. We have to solve for the pay (fix the broken business model of child care) first. If the brand’s value proposition is that child care is essential to the fabric of society, we have to put our money where our mouth is, so we can deliver on the promise.
2. Something I’m thinking about a lot is our AI-enabled future, and which jobs will become irrelevant and which jobs more important. As many jobs become automated, it seems we have both a need for more people to do the care work that can’t be done by AI (due to our aging population), and a world where many more people may need jobs. It seems this could be the impetus for re-orientating the brand of child care. There was a time when we were all excited about teaching kindergartners how to code, and now AI has replaced that need. How might we work toward a society with care work at the center?