Whole Child, Whole Day, Whole Year: Assembling a Comprehensive Child Development System for America

Executive Summary

There is a fundamental mismatch between the K-12 public school schedule and the professional hours typically worked by parents. Children are in school from ages 5 to 18, school days mostly end by 3:00 pm, and classes stop for two months in the summer. Parents must piece together a safe place for their children during those nonschool times. A public and comprehensive Child Development System supported by federal funds would provide every child the right to a safe environment while their parents are at work. While ambitious, this system would largely be assembled from structures and practices already in place, which include a patchwork of federal grants and funding and a network of existing providers. There are various ways such a Child Development System could be structured—administered by states, federal funds flowing directly to providers, or, as recommended in this report, a blend of both. Early childhood, after-school, and summer camp providers would be reimbursed based on labor and capital costs, and programming would offer children an enriching social and emotional learning experience that public schools typically must deprioritize to focus on academics. While there are tough challenges to account for in designing such a system—like ensuring access for all children and preventing competition with public schools—such an investment in children and families not only holds promise for economic equity and prosperity but is an imperative for a thriving society.

Introduction

There is a fundamental disconnect between the K-12 public school system and the labor market demands faced by parents. While most parents must return to work mere weeks after a child is born and typically work 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, children are in school ages 5–18, and school days mostly end by 3:00 pm and stop for two months in the summer. The gaps—before children are school age, outside of school hours, and during the summer—fall to parents to fill, either by providing care themselves, finding unpaid care arrangements, or purchasing private care.

At minimum, all children should have access to a safe environment while their parents are at work, and parents shouldn’t have to ration work because they can’t find or afford a safe place for their children to be during the workday. The patchwork approach that many parents must use in finding care—a mix of formal and informal, paid and unpaid, regular and irregular providers—is not serving parents or children well. We need a comprehensive system for filling these gaps that starts in early childhood, spans after school and summer, and is affordable for all families and accessible by all children.

While it sounds ambitious, many of the pieces are already there: The funding streams, reimbursement model, administrators, and regulatory system are already in place, as are a base of providers. But this existing patchwork serves only low-income children who are lucky enough to benefit from limited public funds or children whose parents are rich enough to afford private care.

We wouldn’t intentionally design the system we have now, but we can use it to build something better—a new system that this report refers to as the Child Development System. A new, comprehensive Child Development System doesn’t need to be built so much as assembled, funded, and augmented. On the public side, we can take the current, myriad funding streams for early childhood, before and after school, and summer programming and combine them into a single fund that is large enough to offer all children access. Providers that currently sell care on the market could join the Child Development System via a reimbursement model. Instead of selling care, they would be reimbursed for it at cost by the government. Providers that currently use patchwork public funding to provide programming, such as using Title I funds to have before- and after-school programs, could similarly join a new comprehensive reimbursement model.

The North Star for such a system’s design would be meeting families where they are. Parents want quality, proximity, affordability, and options—things that the private market for care and before- and after-school programs mostly fail to provide, and that are hard to find during the summer. They want a situation that is safe and enriching, to know that their child is in good hands and that if they don’t like a particular place they can always go somewhere else. That requires communities to have numerous options for early childhood, after school, and summer arrangements and that those options reflect the economic, cultural, and transit realities of the community. The key is having ample and diverse providers that reflect parent and community preferences.

The North Star for such a system’s design would be meeting families where they are. Parents want quality, proximity, affordability, and options—things that the private market for care and before- and after-school programs mostly fail to provide, and that are hard to find during the summer.

Combining early childhood, before and after school, and summer into a unified Child Development System is a statement of values: These three areas are not ranked, and policy should not be triaged between them. The minimum that parents and children deserve is universal coverage for child development. It also reflects basic logistics of parents and providers: Using complements in administration, funding, and staffing to foster an ecosystem of care in local areas is more efficient and would allow families with multiple children of different ages to deal only with a single system.

The system proposed here spans multiple age bands and existing fields and programs—sometimes called care, or education, or camp—so the use of the word “development” is deliberate. It is a way to encompass what exists while also distinguishing the proposal presented here. “Development” evokes the idea that the system has a broader goal: A system of development can balance the academic exigencies and performance testing of school with child-led learning and a focus on individual growth. In the early years, this includes screening for milestone delays and access to supplemental therapy. As children age, it grows to encompass child-led learning and exploration outside of the formal academic record—a kid can fail biology, but not science camp.

Done well, this system could bolster a public school system struggling to keep up with the evolving and expanding needs of children. The public K-12 system does not meet the time demands of parents’ jobs and realistically never will. It will not expand to include infants or increase its hours or cover summer months. It often does not meet many of the developmental needs of children due to its prioritization of academic instruction and scholastic achievement. That is not a shortcoming but a constraint; many schools and curriculum incorporate development and socioemotional learning, but there are only so many hours of instruction, and academics will always be paramount.

Either those constraints can continue to weigh on families, or their solutions can be features of a new, complementary Child Development System. The two systems would work not in contrast but in concert to invest in children—not just some of the time and not just in some ways, but fully: whole child, whole day, whole year. In multiple senses, the Child Development System represents potential—it both is within our potential and has enormous potential to benefit children.

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