An interesting article flashed across my Twitter feed Thursday, this one from Reason, the libertarian magazine based in DC. According to the article, which was cribbed from the Daily News, Three Rivers Christian School in Longview, Washington, recently removed the swing sets from its daycare playground because of cumbersome new rules handed down by the state.
James Murphy, director of the early learning center at Three Rivers Christian School, told the Daily News that due to new state regulations that require childcare providers to undergo costly training and certification, the school is increasingly reliant on subsidies from the state. These subsidies are determined by the school's rating through Early Achievers, an initiative created by the Department of Children, Youth, and Families. Early Achievers provides early childcare programs like Three Rivers with a set of guidelines, as well as resources on how to fulfill those guildelines, and then evaluates the programs according to how well they perform. The better the school does, the higher the rating, and the more funding the program receives from the state. And one of those guidelines, according to the Daily News, is that kids should not use swing sets more than 15 minutes a day. As Mallory Gruben wrote in the paper, "Removing the sets eliminates any temptation students have to spend longer in the swings—and negatively impact the score."
This is a crazy rule. As Reason's Lenore Skenazy pointed out, physical activity (including swinging) is good for childhood development. "Play is not the opposite of education," Skenazy writes, "It is education." There is plenty of evidence to back this up. Skenazy herself runs Let Grow, a non-profit organization that touts the value of unstructured play. It does seem ludicrous that the state would penalize daycares for letting their kids do exactly what kids should be doing.
The thing is, it's not. According to a spokesperson from the Department of Children, Youth, and Families, there are no guidelines under Early Achievers limiting the use of swings. In fact, there is nothing specific about swings in the guidelines at all. What the guidelines do say is that kids shouldn't be left unoccupied or unattended for long periods of time, including in swings, where they'll eventually get bored and start dangling. The point isn't to regulate the use of swings; it's to make sure that "children are engaged in active play." I'm not a child person, but from the department's perspective, it sounds a lot less like Big Government overreach and a lot more like sensible babysitting to me.
Still, the state doesn't seem to be conveying these guidelines clearly enough for everyone. In a phone call, Murphy said that when the school went through a mock review in preparation for their actual Early Achievers assessment, a representative from Child Care Aware—a nonprofit childcare referral program that partners with the Department of Early Learning—marked the school down for letting a toddler swing in the outdoor swings for over 15 minutes. And, because toddlers will freak the fuck out when you try to take them out of the swing before they are ready (you try explaining bureaucracy to a two-year-old) it just made sense to remove them entirely. Murphy says this decision was affirmed by the regional coordinator for Child Care Aware as well as a coach from Early Achievers. But despite Murphy's interpretation of the guidelines, multiple representatives from the Department of Children, Youth, and Families assured me that swings aren't just acceptable but encouraged.
The reporting might have been slightly off but the broader point of the Daily News story is that southwest Washington is in the midst of a childcare crisis, and that's true across the rest of the country as well, as childcare gets both more expensive and harder to find. According to Center for American Progress, "71 percent of parents report that locating quality, affordable childcare in their communities is a serious problem."
Paying for childcare can be a job in itself. The average annual cost for full-time infant care in Washington state, according to the Economic Policy Institute, is $1,061 per month, per child, or $12,733 a year, which is 45 percent higher than in-state tuition at most public universities in Washington state. And you can't exactly get student loans to pay for daycare. (At $1109 a month for full-time infant care, Three Rivers Christian School is just under average.)
As expensive as childcare can be for parents, the workers aren't getting rich either. Three Rivers, according to Murphy, pays most of their employees around the state minimum wage, which is currently $12 an hour. And that's actually better than much of the country, where, according to the latest Bureau of Labor statistics, the average wage for childcare workers is just $10.18 an hour, that's $21,170 a year working full-time. You'd make more walking Goldendoodles for rich people.
The childcare crisis is beginning to make waves in Washington, DC. Washington Senator Patty Murray, herself a former pre-school teacher, toured around the state in 2017, talking to childcare providers and the families who depend on them. Soon after, she drafted the Child Care for Working Families Act in 2017, a bill that, in her words, "would significantly expand access to childcare and early learning for low and middle-income families by bringing down rising childcare costs, making major investments in training and compensation for childcare workers, and significantly expanding access to high-quality preschool for low- and middle-income 3 and 4 year olds." The bill didn't go anywhere at the time, but according to a spokesperson from Sen. Murray's office, she plans to reintroduce in this Congress.
As for Three Rivers Christian School, unless they want to increase tuition—and burden the families they serve even more—the school needs those Early Achievers subsidies from the state. And until the powers that be expressly tell the school administration that it’s okay for kids to swing for more than 15 minutes a day, they have no plans to replace them any time soon. But if that happens, James Murphy says, "Yes, absolutely. The kids love them.”
