A Crisis of Care: Putting northern Michigan's childcare crisis into focus

Multiple studies show that Michigan loses billions of dollars each year due to a lack of affordable and available childcare.

One study published this year by North Central Michigan College underscores how dire the situation is and how it echoes the national experience. (See the full report at the bottom of this story.)

An issue for decades

Jennifer Wixson heads the Child Care Initiative for North Central Michigan College in Petoskey.

Wixson studied and surveyed Emmet County’s childcare needs and spent the last year putting together the report.

“I’ve been working in the business for 30 years with a brief break to teach kindergarten and first grade,” Wixson said.

And after three decades, Wixson said not much has changed.

“We’re still seeing a lot of the same challenges with the workforce, with our workforce, really continuing to be low paid and lacking benefits of any kind, but most importantly, really lacking a defined career pathway,” she said.

Wixson is not the only one noting stagnation in childcare. An annual study by The Annie E. Casey Foundation's, Kids Count 2023, found the same issues plaguing the industry in 1998.

Providers

Childcare workers wonder if these jobs have a future.

“So we think about the need to have a well defined career pathway," Wixson said. "(The) idea of 'What type of earner will I be able to be in this career?' needs to be better defined, if we want to have an impact on workforce.”

Wixson and her team surveyed about 25 care providers in Emmet County. Staff members make between $13 and $21 an hour. A minority earn $50,000 or more per year.

“So that’s barely considered a living wage for a single person and those low wages are leading to very high turnover and an instability in the childcare system,” she said.

And many don’t receive benefits like health care or retirement.

One care provider in northern Michigan said its profit margin is about one to two percent. Providers are strapped with rising food budgets, strict regulations that require expensive solutions and paying their staff.

That aligns with local, state and national data that say childcare centers are not profitable.

Home care providers also feel the strains of low profits.

Wixson said one home care provider in Emmet County said they net about $500 per year.

Parents

As for parents, the cost has only gone up. On average in Emmet County, parents are spending over $1,000 per month on childcare. And that’s standard across the state and country. The Childcare Initiative surveyed about 300 parents.

Some parents didn’t think about childcare until the second trimester of their pregnancy or just before birth. Others said they didn’t find care until a week before their parental leave ended.

“And it wasn’t their first, second or third choice they just had to take whatever they could get," she said. "And that’s just not a situation that we want for the children and parents in our communities but also isn’t great for the workplace cause it’s bringing so much more stress.”

Another portion of parents in Wixson’s survey said parents had to turn down promotions or reduce their work hours because their employer lacked flexibility or benefits to support new parents.

“63 percent of those respondents indicated that their employers were family friendly but very few offered paid maternity or paternity leave and that was one of the highest stressors, but also one of the highest requested benefits,” Wixson said.

A different study byThe Annie. E Casey Foundation also found that the shortcomings of the child care system disproportionately affect the financial well-being of women, single parents, parents in poverty, families of color and immigrant families.

Employers

In previous reporting, IPR spoke to local employers who said a lack of affordable, available childcare was hurting staff recruitment and retention.

Wixson said they heard the same thing in their surveys.

Wixson checked in with 96 business leaders in Emmet County. All of those were anonymous, mostly in the hospitality and service, construction and education sectors.

Now that the college has done this research, the initiative has moved on to developing and planning prototypes for five different innovations, to try and change the childcare industry.

Ultimately Wixson and the Child Care Initiative at the college want to establish an equitable and high quality childcare system. That includes paying providers a living wage and making childcare businesses more profitable but still affordable for parents.

Wixson wants to tap into community support and how it can be shared with neighboring communities in northern Michigan.

“So hopefully, if I am here in another 30 years I’m not looking at the same thing all over again,” she said.

This is the first part of an IPR series. Over the rest of the series, we'll hear from parents, providers and employers about their struggles and their ideas for easing the childcare crisis in our region.

And we'll check back in with Jennifer Wixson at the end of this series. Here's the full report from NCMC's Child Care Initiative: