Mayor Zohran Mamdani is promising to partner with family child care providers in the rollout of universal care for 2-year-olds. But integrating those small business owners — mostly women of color who receive just $6 an hour — could force the mayor to make some difficult tradeoffs, possibly pitting worker pay against the total number of free seats for parents.
Providers who care for kids in their homes make up the majority of the 10,000 licensed child care programs across New York City, making them essential to any effort to expand care for young families. Advocates said these local businesses are also pillars of the community, often caring for generations of children within the same family, and employing alumni as adults.
Raising their wages while fulfilling Mamdani’s pledge for free universal child care will not be easy.
“It means that the money that is allocated for this year won't stretch as far,” Lauren Melodia, director of economic and fiscal policies at The Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, said of the effort to raise providers wages. “But if we push to serve 2,000 children, paying people $6 an hour, there's also a danger there.”
The home care providers were largely left out of previous efforts to expand free pre-K and 3-K, advocates said, leaving them teetering on the edge of financial instability. Now as Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mamdani seek to dramatically reduce the cost of child care, providers are calling attention to their own affordability crisis.
“They’re really struggling,” said Melodia, who coauthored a report from the center last fall that found providers typically only make $6 an hour after paying minimum wages for staff and covering the costs of supplies and insurance.
The backbone of NYC child care
Shannan Ramsay has welcomed generations of children into her home since she opened Step With Purpose day care in East New York in 2005. She’s changed thousands of diapers, helped children ready themselves for kindergarten and even hired adults she used to take care of as infants.
”We give that individualized love and we strengthen the families, which is something they need so that we can build them up to get them to those next steps of public school,” she said.
Providers like Ramsay often offer families more flexible hours if they work later or longer shifts. They also provide care in multiple languages. More than 90% of home-based providers are women of color.
Some programs are licensed for up to 16 kids and allow mixed-age learning rather than separating kids into different classrooms. Home-based providers were among the few child care programs that remained open during the pandemic.
“ They … overwhelmingly stayed open and were the ones who were showing up to take care of kiddos of essential workers. It has been really an overlooked sector,” said Danielle Demeuse, director of policy for the Committee for Hispanic Children and Families.
But when the de Blasio administration rolled out free preschool with its universal pre-K and 3-K efforts more than a decade ago, officials focused on seats in public schools and day care centers, omitting older kids from home providers. As a result, family child care providers saw lower enrollments and had to rely on infants and younger toddlers, who are more expensive to care for.
Since 2014, when pre-K was rolled out, to just before the pandemic, 1,300 home-based providers closed, according to a recent report by the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School. About 6,500 such providers remain in the city. But nearly half of family child care providers do not pay themselves a set wage. The median wage for owners is $6 but goes up to about $18 an hour when enrollment levels hover around 60%-70% capacity, the report found.
Mayor Mamdani has made free universal childcare a central part of his agenda.
Owners generally pay minimum wage to assistant child care workers they hire.
“Workers in a lot of cases have a higher wage than the actual owner, who has to pay liability insurance, worker comp, all these different expenditures just to run a quality program,” said Tammie Miller, child care provider chair for the United Federation of Teachers.
Many of them have gone into debt to cover their costs.
“By the time you pay your staff, by the time you buy food, by the time you buy material, by the time you buy supplies, and since COVID and since everyone's always getting sick, we're spending more and more money on paper towels, napkins, Clorox wipes, shoe covers, masks,” said Ramsay, the longtime Brooklyn provider.
There’s also her rent and utilities, which continue to go up.
“I have been living off of loans and now it's catching up to me because the enrollments are low,” Ramsay said.
Most providers in home-based settings are also highly dependent on public assistance: Nearly half qualify for Medicaid, and 22% receive food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
“There is absolutely no way that we can get to universal child care if we do not invest in the workforce,” said Marina Marcou-O'Malley, co-executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education, a statewide education advocacy group.
The mayor’s commitment to family providers
Mamdani has said including home-based providers is a priority.
“We will deliver 2-Care by working in partnership with child care providers. Especially home-based providers,” he said at a press conference with Hochul this month announcing new state funding for the program, which is a key plank of his mayoral campaign.
But family providers and their advocates are calling on the mayor who campaigned on affordability to boost wages for the low-paid workforce.
They are lobbying state and city leaders to create a worker compensation fund that can subsidize worker pay and make sure city contracting rates are the same whether a child under 5 is cared for at home, at a center or in a school.
Hochul has pledged $500 million over two years for the city’s 2-Care program, but in announcing her spending plan last week, made no mention of boosting worker wages. State officials said they’re looking at potential fixes to wage disparities.
Mamdani has not said whether or how he will boost providers wages. City Hall issued a statement saying the mayor is committed to “a living wage” for all child care workers.
"Mayor Mamdani has been clear that family child care providers will be a vital part of the 2-Care program,” said Jenna Lyle, a spokesperson for the mayor. “We will continue to assess the rate structure and operational support needed to ensure providers can participate fully and employees entrusted with the care of our children are paid a genuine living wage. Discussions about rates and wages will involve our state partners and our partners in labor."
