Day care versus child care: Which is the correct term to use?
An email sent last week by the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services asked the media to shift language from using “day care” to “child care.
The state said “day care” is an antiquated term saying it is, “At best, inaccurate — nobody cares for days — and at worst, it ignores the science of healthy development at the expense of young children, their families and early childhood teachers.”
WRAL News called the state Department of Health and Human Services and asked: With all the crises facing the child-care industry, why bother with semantics?
“The scope of the work of being an early educator or preschool teacher is way more than what we would think of as a babysitter or a nanny, and so, the term ‘day care’ is really more from a time past where children were in an out-of-home setting so that parents could go to work,” said Ariel Ford, the director of the Division of Child Development and Early Education for the Department of Health and Human Services.
Ford said that some of the workers don’t like the term. Many of them are highly trained with years of schooling – and it’s insulting to some of them.
Where would we be without child care workers? Imagine the COVID-19 pandemic without them.
In April, child care workers from across the state rallied in Raleigh outside the General Assembly. They want better pay and benefits. The average wage in North Carolina is about $12 an hour – and if they don’t get help from the state – the only way to get it is to make care more expensive for families.
In 2020, WRAL News found the average cost of day care in North Carolina was more expensive than college tuition. That year, the average cost was about $9,200 per year.
A story posted by the Charlotte Observer had similar findings with another price increase expected by next year.
Personal finance website WalletHub published a survey this year that ranks North Carolina last in the nation for the cost of child care.
The North Carolina Early Education Coalition found “only 26.7% of families can afford care without exceeding the federal recommendation of spending no more than 10% of family income on childcare.”
Even with child care being so expensive, there are tens of thousands of children on waitlists across the state.
