Child care workers are struggling

Makenzee. Ja’Kari. Jordan. Arielle. Bella. Arianna.

Carla Brown gets to work a half an hour early, usually around 7:30 a.m. every morning, just to watch her babies walk in.

Sitting with her tea, she runs through her plans for each of the students in her classroom on a day last spring at Above and Beyond Learning Childcare Center, a child care center on Detroit’s northeast side. She lays out the items she’ll need for today’s activities with her toddlers, roughly between 2 and 3 years old.

Water bowls for finger painting. Dollar Store sponges Brown has cut up to teach the kids shapes. Tupperware filled with little toys to sound out letters and words.

The activities are sweet, but this is serious work. Early educators like Brown care for and teach kids during what experts agree is the most critical time for brain development. Brown doesn’t just watch over her babies, she’s setting the foundation for their future learning and success.

Born and raised on the west side of Detroit, Brown, 54, says she has been taking care of children on and off her whole life from around age 11.

“I’ve always been an old soul, people used to have me watching their 6-month-old children and I was only 12,” she says.

Even outside the classroom, it’s rare to find a moment where Brown’s mind isn’t consumed by the kids. On the weekends, she’s still hooked, spending her Saturdays and Sundays making new curriculum. She once crafted a sheep out of Q-tips for a game where kids practice their fine motor skills — it was an activity geared especially toward one of her students who is nonverbal and enjoys using her hands.

Brown’s friends often have to drop by her home to pull her away from her job.

“They say ‘we’re getting ready to go on a walk, I know you there working!’ ” she says.

Now, Brown’s up, busying herself in the moments of relative calm before sticky hands, impatient cries and six different potty-training schedules become a deluge of demands pulling at her attention

The dedication, extra hours and the significance of the task at hand — to build young brains — translates to a $15-an-hour paycheck, an amount Brown could likely surpass working at any of the nearby fast food restaurants.

Low pay, hard work and high stakes

Passion like Brown’s is what tends to keep child care workers in the job for longer than a few months — not the pay or benefits. As a toddler teacher, Brown gets paid around a dollar more than the state median hourly wage for a child care worker: $13.88.

Brown is on Medicaid, like 40% of child care workers in Michigan. The majority of this workforce lacks access to employer-sponsored benefits like health care and retirement.

A living wage for a single adult in Wayne County would be between around $20 and $55 an hour, depending on the number of kids in a household, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Living Wage Calculator.

Like Brown, the people who take care of Michigan’s youngest children — those between birth and 3 years old — receive low pay for a challenging job that plays a critical role in creating a society with a better shot at well-adapted, functioning adults — one with a higher-earning workforce and lower rates of school dropouts and incarceration.

Between birth and 3 years old, research shows a baby’s brain grows to 80% of its adult size, forming millions of new neural connections a minute that will lay the foundation for all kinds of skills that have implications for future thriving, like academic ability and emotional well-being.

And though infant and toddler care is also the most expensive in early childhood due to state ratios requiring more staff, advocates say state investment has not reflected the high costs and high stakes.

Most state investment has gone primarily toward 4-year-olds, as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration expanded its pre-K initiative known as the Great Start for Readiness Program, or GSRP, which became available to all families regardless of income in August 2024.

According to a 2024 report from the Michigan League for Public Policy, Michigan spends $210 on the care and education of young children for every $1,000 it spends on school-age children. “Of that small amount, the majority — approximately 64% — is allocated to state-funded pre-K,” the report reads.

Above and Beyond Learning Childcare Center’s director Nina Hodge is able to pay her lead GSRP teacher a minimum of $30 an hour because of the funding she gets through the state for the program.

Hodge says she can’t afford to pay her non-GSRP employees, like Brown, a “livable wage” because the state reimburses her between around $6 to $7 an hour per child, not nearly what she says she actually spends for care in her infant and toddler classrooms.

The majority of Hodge’s families receive the child care subsidy so these state payments make up the bulk of her income. Hodge is disappointed that Whitmer’s proposed budget doesn’t include an increase in Michigan’s child care subsidy reimbursement rates.

She says her child care teachers are working just as hard as the GSRP teachers — building children’s foundations, teaching them how to walk and potty-training — but the GSRP teachers are getting paid more.

Low compensation leads to high turnover, according to experts. After four years at Above and Beyond Learning Childcare Center, Brown is now Hodge’s longest serving employee.

Hodge acknowledges that GSRP teachers are required to have additional credentials, either a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education, child development or the equivalent. Still, she sees it as unfair.

“You’re doing the same value of work I’m doing, and you’re getting paid more for it,” she says, putting herself in the mindset of one of her infant and toddler teachers. “Make that make sense.”

“Thank God we have love in the building,” Hodge says.

Educators, not babysitters

Brown doesn’t seem to sit down for more than a few minutes at her job. She’s standing or crouching. Tall in stature, she’s most often bending forward, back parallel to the ground, to bring herself closer to her kids.

Wearing blue scrubs, flats and a headband to push back her bouncy black curls, at 10 a.m., Brown starts to wrangle the kids around the small table at the center of the room: It’s snack time.

It has not yet been two hours, but Brown and her toddlers have already done so much.

They’ve sorted through what Brown calls in a sing-songy voice, her Handy Dandy Letters! They’re alphabetically labeled Tupperware containers filled with little objects whose name begins with the corresponding letter. Picking up one of the Tupperware containers, Brown shakes it in her hands back and forth like a handleless maraca, whipping her head back and forth. Some of the kids shake their bodies along in excitement.

She cracks the container open. “B is for?,” Brown prompts her students, taking out the first object. Bell. Bottle. Ball.

Along with practicing the alphabet and vocabulary this morning, the toddler room has also practiced how to share, go to the bathroom on the toilet, put toys away after playtime and the different sounds animals make.

For a 2-year-old’s sponge-like brain, every moment is an opportune time for learning, and Brown doesn’t seem to miss any. Even something like helping wipe the table down post-snack time is an opportunity to practice their fine motor skills.

People don’t understand what goes into the work of infant and toddler care, says Barb Newkumerat, 30, the lead infant teacher at It’s a Small World Daycare in Ypsilanti.

“We are intentional teachers,” Newkumerat says. “Not just babysitters.”

Newkumerat, who has worked at It’s a Small World Daycare for nearly five years, finds that people don’t understand that even though they’re working with young kids, infant and toddler teachers do skilled work.

“High quality teaching is incredibly demanding cognitively, physically, emotionally,” says Holly Brophy-Herb, a developmental scientist studying infants and toddlers at Michigan State University.

In Newkumerat’s classroom of infants ranging from 6 weeks to 15 months, Newkumerat and her assistant teacher are tracking 34 standards on a daily basis. These include creative arts, initiative and planning, and, surprisingly, mathematics.

“In their case, it’s the ability to look at your pile of blocks and theirs, and recognize that you have more,” she said. “It’s measurements.”

The work is complex, in some ways even more so for infant and toddler teachers because their kids can be on such vastly differing developmental levels, says Brophy-Herb.

Teachers are “making hundreds of decisions in their heads every moment to meet these individualized needs, to keep these children on these developmental milestones and to deliver individualized, responsive programming,” she said. “It’s not just one size fits all.”

For Brown, it’s exhilarating to see the fruits of her labor.

“One little boy, I didn’t know he could say anything,” she says. Recently though, while making handprint art for Mother’s Day, she asked him what color his handprint was. He replied correctly: yellow and blue.

“ ‘Wait a minute,’ I’m thinking,” Brown says. “Some can talk, but not him — so I get excited.”

She has shepherded along almost all of her kids into speaking.

“When I first was working with them, none of them were verbal and now I got a background singer!,” she says, referring to Makenzee’s — one of her students — chattiness.

Brittany Christian, Makenzee’s mom, says that’s all thanks to Brown. Christian, who lives on the east side of Detroit, also has two older boys. But because their grandmother would watch them when they were little, Makenzee was the first kid she has put in child care.

Christian says she was shocked by how fast Makenzee developed as a result of being in Brown’s classroom, especially compared with where her sons were at Makenzee’s age.

“It’s stunning me a little,” Christian says of her daughter. “She can tell you what she wants, tell you that it hurts, tell you what’s wrong. I’m like, ‘girl, slow down!’ ”

Christian says her daughter can also count to 10, went from being able to say “two words to 20” over the course of her year in the classroom, no longer needs a sippy cup, knows her colors and knows how to spell and is fully potty trained.

“It just blew me away; she turned 2 in January,” she says.

Now, Brown asks Makenzee to help her pass out the paper plates for snack time. As they munch on their Goldfish crackers, Brown sits for the first time to take morning attendance.

“Ja’Kari, is Ja’Kari here?,” Brown asks looking around the table in mock confusion, pretending to look for Ja’Kari, who sits right in front of her.

Ja’Kari raises his hand. “Here!”

“I’m glad to finally get a word out of you!”

Mid-conversation one child spills her orange juice, putting her hands to her face in a mixture of disappointment and shame.

“It’s OK, it’s just an accident!,” Brown says, unfazed by the first mess of the day. “Everybody say: ‘It’s OK!’”

A chorus of little voices repeat after her, reassuring their classmate. Brown is back up on her feet.

Little investment in the state’s youngest

In 2025, Michigan’s state budget for child care was around $70 million. For preschool, its budget was around $655 million.

If ages birth to 3 is such an important time in a child’s life, and if the providers like Hodge and educators like Brown taking care of this particular age group are so clearly struggling to stay afloat, why has the lion’s share of state investment gone toward 4-year-olds?

It’s political, says Tyler Huntey, president of the Michigan Child Care Provider Collective’s board, which advocates for providers in the state. Huntey is also a provider himself of Huntey’s Clubhouse, six early learning centers across central Michigan.

“(Universal pre-K) was a hot topic and you had an administration that knows child care is a challenge,” Huntey said. “It was an easy political win.”

Huntey says universal pre-K provided a simple answer in a very complicated early education landscape.

Easy to explain and to implement within an already existing state program, the policy was also an easy sell to stakeholders like school districts that stood to gain from the investment. (Districts receive funding from the state to open pre-K classrooms.)

Not as easy is explaining the return on investment for funding the care of the state’s youngest, Huntey says.

It would cost $120 million annually to pay for the over 8,000 infant to 3-year-olds currently served by the child care subsidy, according to Jeanna Capito, the author on a Think Babies analysis of cost of care in Michigan. That estimate includes paying staff a living wage.

But the amount of kids currently being served only represents a fraction of who qualifies for and needs subsidized child care in Michigan, she said. Annual state funding for birth to 3-year-olds climbs to $840 million to pay for every kid who qualifies and needs the subsidy — nearly 60,000 kids — if rates included paying staff a living wage.

There hasn’t been political will for that kind of investment, Huntey says.

Early education providers have continued beating the same drum: to support them, the state must increase reimbursement rates for the Child Development and Care subsidy (CDC), Michigan’s child care subsidy program for low-income families.

According to a 2024 state survey of providers, over half of the nearly 3,000 Michigan child care providers who responded to the survey care for kids who use the CDC and are reliant on the state funds to make up what parents can’t pay. Significant increases in rates would allow providers to increase infant and toddler teacher wages.

This would mean less staff turnover, fewer empty classrooms and more families able to access child care, providers and experts say.

The state has only increased the CDC reimbursement rate incrementally over the past few years — most recently by 15% in FY2025. The current rate is slated to remain the same in Whitmer’s 2026 budget.

“They say they want quality but they’re not giving us enough money for quality,” said Candies Rogers, who owns Circle Time With Friends Learning Center Too, in Detroit.

Whitmer’s budget maintains the FY2025 rate increase, in addition to including other investments aimed at lowering costs for families like Tri-Share, which splits child care costs between families, businesses and the state, according to MiLEAP, a state agency overseeing early education initiatives.

Some early childhood advocates acknowledge that while investment in the child care subsidy is important, it’s just one piece of the puzzle to fund infant and toddler care and lower the cost of child care in Michigan.

The state has tried a number of solutions, many temporary, and experts say there are a number of other policies Michigan could implement that have found success in other states.

Teachers spread thin

The ants go marching one by one, hurrah hurrah! Brown sings to coax her kids into a neat single-file line out to the playground.

Recess can be a high stress time for Brown because of the fear that one of her kids with special needs will take off, climb up something, and hurt themselves, she says. Brown has taught multiple kids with developmental disabilities throughout her years at Above and Beyond Learning Childcare Center and says it’s the hardest part of her job.

It’s difficult to balance the needs of a classroom when one child requires more attention. It “throws the other ones off, or makes them feel some kind of way,” she says.

Betty Favors, 67, owns Cribs2College Academy in Detroit and says she sees the strain that working with special needs children places on her early education teachers. Without resources from the state for kids with special needs, like additional state subsidy dollars, it becomes impossible to afford things like teacher training or hiring certified therapists to support students, Favors said.

Brown said she thinks state ratios should be smaller in classrooms with kids who have more severe special needs.

“How can you be teaching other kids when your mind have to keep this one from practically killing themself?” she said.

Stay or go?

Kids have begun filtering out of Above and Beyond Learning Childcare Center for the last hour. Brown sets up a game for the three toddlers left.

A few of the kids take their turns, and right as it comes time for Arielle’s, her mom arrives to pick her up. Arielle is worried she won’t get her turn, but as her mom chats with Hodge in the other room, Brown looks conspiratorially at her. “OK, let’s do it, quick!”

When Arielle is called again to come meet her mom, she runs toward the front office, waving distractedly to the group behind her.

“OK, love you and see you tomorrow,” Brown calls after her. Arielle doesn’t hear her.

“Arielle, love you,” Brown says, laughing.

Arielle realizes Brown is talking to her and runs back to give Brown a hug. “Byeeeee,” Arielle coos.

Brown says she has considered leaving the profession.

“I know I need more money,” she says. “As soon as you pay the bills, it’s time to pay again.”

Before starting back in child care work at Above and Beyond Learning Childcare Center, Brown considered a job at Chrysler, but was drawn back into child care — she loves working with kids, plain and simple.

She has also considered pursuing additional education that would allow her to teach in a higher-paying GSRP classroom, but has been held back by worries that she wouldn’t be able to teach older kids, like 4-year-olds as well. Though, she says, she recognizes, “wait a minute! It’s practically what I’m doing.”

Whether to stay in toddler care is a looming question for Brown.

“It’s back and forth, you know,” she says. “But then, who would have my children?”

Beki San Martin is a fellow at the Detroit Free Press who covers child care, early childhood education and other issues that affect the lives of children ages 5 and under and their families in metro Detroit and across Michigan. Contact her at rsanmartin@freepress.com.

This fellowship is supported by the Bainum Family Foundation. The Free Press retains editorial control of this work.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan child care workers face high stakes, hard work at $15 an hour