Daycare providers in Massachusetts given the green-light to reopen, but don’t see a viable way forward.

Twenty-five years ago, the Carnegie Corporation released “Starting Points,” a report that described the lack of child care for infants and toddlers as a “quiet crisis.” It painted a bleak picture of overwhelmed families, persistent poverty, inadequate health care and child care of such poor quality that it threatened young children’s intellectual and emotional development.

If day cares closed because of the novel coronavirus, Aimee expected her family to fare better than most. She worked full time as the chief executive of a tech company while her husband stayed home.

Like many child care providers, Moran serves families who pay out of their own pockets as well as low-income families who qualify for public subsidies.

We’ve long failed to fund the child care sector like the public good that it is. Now it’s on the brink of collapse.

Parents are expected to get back to work — and they want to — but how can they do it without the child care they rely on? Can an economy fully recover without robust child care?

The state has allowed a network of emergency childcare centers to remain open for children of essential workers, and those centers can now accept any child whose parent must return to work.

In some ways, Rachel Johnson is grateful for Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s mid-March business shutdown order: it took the agonizing decision over whether to close the child care center she runs with her husband out of their hands.

As parts of the country tiptoe back toward more normal routines, working parents are desperate for child care. Still, they must weigh the risks of sending their children outside the safety of their homes to be cared for by someone else.

Operating a child care center was never a big money-maker in the best of times, but running one during a pandemic is basically like taking a bunch of money and setting it on fire.

Taking on the challenges of Covid-19 one step at a time.

Senators Jacky Rosen (D-NV) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) joined Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) and 21 of their Senate colleagues in a bipartisan letter to Senate Leadership urging them to provide more support for child care to ensure parents can return to work as the economy re-opens.

Child Care is an essential component of our national economic infrastructure, as fundamental as our roads and bridges. Just ask any parent performing essential services during the pandemic, or any mom or dad juggling kids and working from home.

When families with children emerge from home or fall back from the frontlines, the world will be very different. Parents looking for work or trying to keep our jobs will confront a decimated economy, and we will find fewer early education or after school programs to help care for and nurture our kids.

In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, the United States stands at an inflection point; our policymakers hold in their hands the future of the American narrative.

Struggling child care providers across Massachusetts say their prolonged closure for the coronavirus pandemic may result in their economic ruin, leaving working parents in the lurch.

Child care centers are more essential than ever, yet they are not getting the funds they need to survive the lockdowns.

The question of when America will go back to work has dominated the public discourse, but whenever that happens, who will watch our children?

Just as the COVID-19 pandemic reveals how critical child care is to essential workers, the crisis is creating additional stresses for child care providers

During this crisis, local philanthropy has an essential role to play in bolstering a pillar of their local economies: child care. Two immediate ways they can do this: offer direct emergency funding paired with local advocacy and help providers navigate the hurdles to securing and gaining access to new public support.