Child care in Indiana is a mess.
The Indiana Family Social Services Administration has suspended new childcare vouchers and reduced rates to providers. The number of infants receiving vouchers has dropped by 95%, and more than 20 providers have already closed their doors.
Advocates and families are understandably furious at the agency. But, if we’re going to fix this, we must see the problem for what it really is: not just a failure of government, but a failure of our collective imagination about what care is and what it’s worth.
Let’s dive into the childcare situation. FSSA argues that the previous administration expanded child care vouchers and raised rates using temporary COVID-19 funds with no plan for continuation once those funds expired, and that they had no choice but to take these extreme measures.
A crisis of temporary fixes
That’s partially true. The plan was always for the legislature to continue funding child care with state dollars, because child care access is essential to the state’s economic health.
That might sound naïve, but given that Indiana’s budget is rewritten every two years, it was the only realistic plan. Gov. Mike Braun’s administration even included funding for child care stability in its proposed budget, and the legislature stripped it out.
No one likes a civics lecture, but it bears repeating: The legislature makes the laws and appropriates the money. If advocates are going to get mad at any branch of government, they should direct that anger at the legislature. The executive branch merely carries out the legislature’s priorities, and those priorities have been crystal clear for years: lower taxes and smaller government, with whatever services can fit inside those constraints.
Lawmakers followed voters’ lead
That’s where the deeper issue comes in. Legislators are responsive to voters, and voters don’t really care about child care, at least not enough to pay for it.
There’s a persistent fantasy in Indiana politics that we can have adequate services and lower taxes all at once. The math simply doesn’t work, because care is provided by people doing real jobs who, like everyone else, need to be paid for their time.
Nothing illustrates that magical thinking better than FSSA’s recent statement that “there is only one pot of money — we could either protect providers or kids, and we chose kids.” That doesn’t make sense, but it does reflect a massive disconnect in how we think about care.
Child care providers have to pay staff, rent, insurance and a long list of other fixed costs. No one was getting rich under the old rates, but at least they could keep the lights on. When they can’t anymore, they’ll close, and kids and families suffer anyway.
In pediatric care circles, there’s a famous phrase: there’s no such thing as just a baby. You can’t think of the baby apart from the caregiver, because their well-being is intertwined. The same is true here. You cannot protect “kids” while undercutting the people who care for them. To separate the two is to misunderstand what care even is.
That’s why this crisis, though it presents as a political problem, is ultimately about our values. Lawmakers reflect the priorities of the people they represent. Until we change how we think and talk about care, the politics of it will stay the same.
The challenge, in other words, is emotional and cultural. At its core is a question about what kind of society we want to have. Too many Hoosiers and politicians think of care as a private burden, something that is the “personal responsibility” of each household to solve alone, instead of part of the commons that we are all responsible to maintain.
Care is infrastructure, not charity
Every single person gives and receives care at some point in their life. When those systems falter, families, employers and communities all pay the price. Investing in care is considered welfare or charity instead of what it actually is: necessary maintenance of the civic and economic foundation that enables our collective capacity to work, grow and thrive.
The legislature, empowered by voters with zero tolerance for even a whisper of raising revenue and seemingly infinite tolerance for services that fall short, created this mess, but I think lawmakers can fairly and accurately say they were just reflecting the will of their constituents. Until the people change, the systems will remain the same.
The scary part is that these same dynamics are playing out, in different forms, across the entire care continuum: from child care to elder and disability care. At some point, with multiple crises of care converging into a slow rolling civic disaster, voters will be forced to wake up to reality.
When they do, the legislature will follow. Hopefully it won’t be too late.
Jay Chaudhary is a former director of the Indiana Division of Mental Health and Addiction and chair of the Indiana Behavioral Health Commission. He writes the Substack, Favorable Thriving Conditions.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana’s child care crisis is bigger than politics. It’s about our values. | Opinion
Reporting by Jay Chaudhary / Indianapolis Star
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