I sat with Rachel in her home while a handful of three- and four-year-olds (and one 2.5-year-old) cleaned up their lunch plates and got themselves ready for their naps. We were on the first floor of Rachel’s Victorian home, still a large parlor room, now less for entertaining guests and more for supporting young children’s growth and development. Most things were child-height, even though Rachel, who had lived in this home for many years, had passed retirement age and was a few years into her 70s.
Rachel was intent on ensuring that I understood what her licensed family child care program was about: making sure that the young children in her care had as many learning experiences as a day with her could hold. As children nodded off to sleep, she took me on a tour of the space–books using indoor clotheslines to keep their place, fresh art hung two feet from the floor, and an outdoor space full of mud and places to climb and run and learn about the local birds. Rachel explained her sliding-scale fees and method of selecting families to work with: most from the neighborhood, most working class like her, and making a little too much to qualify for subsidies and not enough to afford market rates.
After the last child was picked up, Rachel half-jokingly asked if I’d like to purchase her family child care business– “What I’d really like to do is wake up at 10am, instead of 6am,” she said before walking me through a succession plan wherein I would serve as Director of her business and she would train and coach me, all while serving as the resident assistant. I politely declined. Later, I realized that this plan was the only way Rachel would be able to wake up at 10am, since she spent all of her retirement savings on addressing an alleged regulation issue some years back.
I think about Rachel often, while knowing that none of the research I’ve done–even the research she was so generous to participate in–can even minutely address some of her more immediate needs or wants. This includes giving her the 10am wake up time that I believe she has more than earned.
Rachel’s not alone: national data demonstrate that approximately 29.6% of the early education workforce is at or near retirement age. State-specific research in California shows that over 50% of center-based early educators are over the age of 50. Massachusetts-focused research shows that over 66% of family child care providers in the state are over the age of 47. Care workers are less likely to receive non-wage benefits than the workforce as a whole: while one-third of workers overall have retirement benefits, only one-in-ten child care workers receive these benefits. These data suggest that few child care businesses offer access to retirement plans, and those that do may see little uptake.
Child care labor is physically, mentally, and emotionally taxing work. In light of these demographics, the early educator workforce needs jobs that provide them with the option to retire when they reach the appropriate age so they may live out their later years with dignity. At the same time, the sector needs career pathways to motivate entry into and retention of a younger generation of early childhood educators. Retirement benefits could help support those goals, as well.
With the support of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, I recently had the opportunity to dig into understanding the retirement landscape pertaining specifically to early educators working in the child care sector, both nationally and in New England. I learned quite a bit:
- Both early educators and their employers are concerned about early educators’ retirement.
- Neither early educators nor their employers have the financial means or resource support to effectively participate in retirement efforts.
- There are less than a handful of fully implemented retirement programs specifically for early educators across the country.
- Piecemeal efforts exist to support early educators or employers (or both) in learning more about retirement and supporting steps toward creating individual- or organizational-level retirement plan participation.
You can read the findings from this research and access the full report here.
One of the biggest takeaways from this work is that the two fully implemented initiatives that I found nationally – San Francisco's C-WAGES program (2011-2016) and Coös County, New Hampshire’s Matched Savings Account Initiative (2020-2023) – have two strong common features. The first is outside capital: in San Francisco’s case, funds came from local government. In Coös County, funds came from a local philanthropy. Speaking to the point that early educators themselves, as well as their employers, are more than likely to be unable to identify, pick, and contribute to a retirement account, these external funds provide a pathway and a jumpstart to saving for retirement. These financial and support resources are relatively low-cost. In Coös County, $250,000 represents three years of funding, and as of the program’s second year, there were substantial funds still available.
But while financial support is absolutely necessary for creating and implementing child care-focused retirement programs, it is not sufficient. The second major ingredient is worker voice and worker power. Autonomy and ground-up ingenuity – and the time and space for workers to envision and design retirement programs that work for them – is the other crucial factor in creating retirement programs that work for early educators (and their employers). In San Francisco, this type of collaborative design was indirect: the C-WAGES program allowed for 25% of local government granted funds to be used in a flexible manner. This flexibility and openness set the stage for innovation: child care employers could use the government money as matching funds. Some banded together to provide more or better options for their employees. In Coös County, the process was much more direct. Committed to taking direction from a group of local center-based Directors, the local philanthropic fund simply listened to what those in the child-care sector needed and co-crafted options based on this direct feedback. It is clear that these two successfully implemented retirement solutions would not have been possible without worker voice and worker autonomy. In giving workers the power to design these programs, both San Francisco’s and Coös County’s programs were not only able to be successfully implemented, but also saw meaningful participation from early educators and employers alike. In Coös County, participants overwhelmingly save for retirement over any of the other matched savings options.
While we’re still far from a national retirement program for early educators, San Francisco’s and Coös County’s programs teach us that retirement for early educators is not merely possible, but it’s also feasible – especially when our institutions directly and intentionally allow workers’ voice and power in charting a path to their own futures. Perhaps some day soon, retired child care workers all will be able to wake up, finally, at 10am after a restful night of sleep.
