This post is part of the COVID Recollections series, which features stories, dispatches, and reflections from the COVID-19 American History Project, a Congressionally funded initiative to create an archive of Americans’ experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a guest post written by folklorist Nicole Musgrave, who was contracted by the American Folklife Center to conduct interviews with Appalachian-based child care workers about their pandemic experiences. The post details Musgrave’s inspiration for the project, her initial findings, and why interviewing child care workers is important for understanding Americans’ experiences with COVID-19.
As an independent folklorist living in Central Appalachia, I’ve had the joy of interviewing all kinds of people about all kinds of topics. I’ve interviewed artists and craftspeople about their creative work, and I’ve interviewed people about family recipes and gardening practices. Often the interviews are fairly joyful, as people describe the traditions and relationships that make their lives meaningful. But sometimes the topics are heavy. One oral history project was particularly eye-opening.
In the fall of 2020, I was hired by an east Kentucky-based nonprofit to conduct phone interviews with child care providers and parents of young children. This “Early Learning During COVID-19” project sought to understand how pandemic lockdowns and restrictions were affecting children, families, and child care providers living in eight eastern Kentucky counties, and how the nonprofit could better support their community. During the interviews, I heard from child care workers in rural Appalachian Kentucky about the impact of the pandemic on their professional lives. I also learned about the ways child care workers swiftly jumped into action to creatively navigate shifting expectations and needs—learning to use online instructional platforms, managing gaps in children’s social and emotional development, and changing physical spaces to accommodate social distancing requirements. Owners of child care centers spoke about growing financial burdens, and workers lamented not being able to fully do the care work they felt was their calling.
When the call came from the American Folklife Center (AFC) for oral history interviews from the frontline of the pandemic, I wanted to amplify the experiences of these rural Appalachian child care workers. A few years into the pandemic, I wanted to revisit the topic and learn how workers have been coping and how children have been developing. My previous oral history work helped me understand this as an important time of reflection within the child care profession.
My current project, titled “It Takes a Village: Rural Central Appalachian Childcare Providers’ COVID-19 Experiences,” takes place in five states in Central Appalachia—Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. I chose these five states because they are places where I’ve lived and worked, and so I felt a certain level of familiarity. I first relied on my personal networks to connect with child care providers. I reached out to friends and colleagues in the region, who connected me with potential interviewees. Once I started talking with child care workers, they often connected me to their colleagues. I primarily met interviewees in their homes or at work—and sometimes this was one-in-the-same. On a few occasions, I met interviewees at a local library. The interviews were recorded and will be archived at the American Folklife Center.
Contextualizing the Work of Child Care Professionals in Appalachia
In Central Appalachia, the role of child care providers is essential to the health and wellbeing of families. Long term trends like the increase in single parent households, an increase in households where both parents work, and a higher rate of people living farther away from networks of familial and community support have forced parents and guardians to rely on professional caregivers. There are unfortunately not enough child care providers in Central Appalachia’s rural communities to meet the demand. In a 2022 report, the Center for American Progress found that, “nearly 70 percent of people in rural Appalachia live in a child care desert—about 20 percent more than the general U.S. population.”
This predicament highlights a glaring contradiction within our economic structure. In a region with some of the nation’s highest poverty rates, families often don’t earn enough income to afford professional child care, meaning some parents and guardians can’t afford to go to work. This would suggest that child care providers feel increasingly pressured to keep their prices and their costs low, meaning workers are paid low wages and owners of child care centers are often barely able to generate enough revenue to pay the bills.
While the dilemma may be heightened in Central Appalachia’s rural communities, it’s not unique to the area. It is present throughout the country, consistently highlighted in national and local news. And the crisis has only gotten worse since the pandemic. According to a 2022 report by Child Care Aware of America, 16,000 child care centers across 37 states have permanently closed since the beginning of the pandemic. According to another 2023 report by the Center for American Progress, nearly 40,000 fewer people are working in the child care industry nationally since the start of the pandemic. While national statistics show the industry has somewhat recovered in the last year, the data in my research suggests that the recovery still lags far behind demand in Central Appalachia.
The child care industry in Central Appalachia is very mixed. It ranges from small independent contractors, to mid-sized establishments run community members, to large corporations like Ballad Health, which has recently expanded their child care operations in the region. Some child care centers are sponsored by churches, some are government-funded, while others operate as non-profits or out of the provider’s home.
While the organizational structure of child care providers varies dramatically, one aspect is consistent: child care workers are overwhelmingly women. According to the Data USA profile on child care, 92% of child care workers in the US are female. In a region in which the labor of men is often at the forefront of popular imagination and rhetoric—think coal miners and loggers—I believe it’s important to amplify this largely female workforce that has not received ample attention.
Recurring Themes in Child Care Worker Interviews
Although I’m still completing my fieldwork, several themes have emerged from the 17 interviews I’ve conducted. Many of the workers I’ve interviewed said that the children they care for feel like family to them. For those providers who had to close during pandemic lockdowns, they described how hard it was to not see the kids for whom they provide care, and how they worried about the kids’ wellbeing.
DeAuna Artis and Jackie Branch of Living Water Child Care & Learning Center in Williamson, West Virginia both spoke about this topic. While the center only closed for two weeks, Jackie describes the difficulty of that time:
And it is, what [DeAuna] said, like a family. You get so accustomed to seeing each other and knowing what’s going on in [the kids’] lives and all these things, that during that time, I think we were all just so desperate for that connection…It was very difficult to not—even in that short time, you know it was really difficult to not have that connection with them.
Many of the interviewees continued to feel a sense of responsibility for the children in their care, even when they were not physically together during pandemic lockdowns. Several interviewees also expressed a strong sense of responsibility to support working parents. Jennifer Robinson of Pike County, Kentucky has nearly 26 years of experience working in child care. Shortly before the pandemic began, she had decided to end her home-based child care service to pursue work in the public school system. When the schools closed in March of 2020, she felt called to help working parents.
I thought, ‘Well, these parents are going to—they have to work, and they’re going to need child care.’ So instead of just not doing anything, I contacted those same parents that I had their children before…and they brought their children back. So I cared for them during the whole pandemic.
Although some workers felt a sense of responsibility, they also recognized that they were putting their personal health, and the health of their families, at risk by continuing to work during the pandemic. Tena Gee and Melissa Colagrosso of A Place to Grow Children’s Center in Oak Hill, West Virginia, spoke about these concerns. Tena described how early in the pandemic, she made the decision that her young children would live with her grandparents, so she could return to work.
So that I could still come to work and be here, my options were to leave my girls with my grandparents. Because I couldn’t do both…So for a big portion [of the pandemic] my kids didn’t even really stay with me. They didn’t live with me. They stayed at my grandparents’…It felt like I didn’t have my kids anymore. It was scary.
Melissa emphasized that the decision to work or not work was one of the many with which child care workers struggled:
The people that stayed and toughed it out, they had to decide. They had to take the risk in child care of infecting their own children. You know? There was this moral compass that had to go of, ‘My goodness, am I choosing this job and to stay here, take care of other people’s kids, but maybe mine will get sick?’
For home providers, the decision of whether or not to work had another layer of complexity, as they were caring for children in their own homes. Missy Nichols, who operates a preschool out of her home in London, Kentucky, recalled having to think through whether or not to continue providing for families.
“I can remember those early days and being very unsettled and very conflicted about still needing to provide for families, but how was it going to affect my family?”
This moral ambiguity also arose around the topic of safety protocols. When child care workers and children were back together, most providers implemented a variety of procedures to reduce the spread of infection. Many interviewees described having to reckon with the fact that some of the safety protocols had negative impacts on children. Social distancing proved to be especially difficult. Part of a child care worker’s job is to soothe and comfort young children. Often, that means close physical contact. Ruth Terrell and Tonya Clark of Communities Closing the Gap after school program in Kanawha County, West Virginia described how, at a certain point, they decided it was necessary to forgo the social distancing guidelines to offer children the physical comfort they needed.
We started realizing the toll that it was taking on them mentally, emotionally…Because they did need [physical comfort]. Some of them did need it…As far as with each other, [the children] couldn’t hug. But the adults that you were working with, if you needed that hug—if we’re having that conversation and we can see that it’s getting emotional and intense, it’s like, ‘Hey, can I give you a hug right now?’ Because we understood that it was taking a toll on them because it was taking a toll on us. — Tonya Clark
Along with social distancing, many of the interviewees described having to weigh the benefits of mask-wearing against the costs. Some providers chose to strictly follow masking guidelines. Others determined the cost to children’s development was too great. Melissa Colagrosso of A Place to Grow in Oak Hill, West Virginia described the challenges mask-wearing created.
If you understand child development, babies and children learn from your facial expressions. They see your lips move, that’s how they learn to talk, that’s how they learn expression. Babies understand a smile before they understand any word. And every time we talked about—’Can you imagine a baby not seeing someone smile all day?’ It just made us sick.
COVID-related safety policies amplified workers’ creativity and broadened their skills. Many interviewees described the inventive ways they implemented protocols and communicated about them to children. Terri Ratliff of Oak Tree Academy in Whitesburg, Kentucky, described her way to make both temperature checks and masks fun for the kids.
In the mornings when [the kids] come in, you have to aim that thermometer at their little heads to take their temperatures. So we just kind of made that a game…They would come in and they would stick their little heads out like a turtle. And we would take [their temperature].
They would make jokes out of the masks…They were superheroes. And we actually let them decorate their masks like they were superheroes.
Stefi Schäfer of Blue Mountain School in Floyd, Virginia, described the creative method she developed to explain social distancing to her preschoolers.
Everybody knew what six feet was. Six feet is three-and-a-half chihuahuas…I researched every size of animals to make posters for the children. We needed to stay half a tiger apart, or whatever the thing was. Just so that they would have something of a visual.
Safety protocols also required workers to be nimble. Interviewees explained that recommendations and guidelines were ever-changing, so they were constantly having to adjust and figure out ways to meet expectations. This was particularly true for child care workers who provide care for school-aged kids. Typically, providers offer “wrap-around care” to school-aged kids, meaning they care for the students before and after the school day. But, when schools closed, many child care providers stayed open, so workers found themselves responsible for helping students with their virtual learning. Katelyn Vandal of A Place to Grown in Oak Hill, West Virginia, described how workers at the center had to figure out how to teach the school-aged kids.
[Staff] were trying to educate themselves so they could help [the students]. It really was quite the learning experience for them, as well. Because they had to adapt. We had to figure out how to teach them. ‘The kids are missing school! We’re in charge of school—Oh my gosh! Okay, let’s figure this out.’ And all of our staff were really gung-ho in wanting to do that, and wanting to provide that same kind of educational experience they knew they were missing. They felt that responsibility to help fill the gap.
Interviewees had a lot to say about the impact of the pandemic on the learning and development of children. Many interviewees described observing delays in speech, fine and gross motor skills, and social and emotional skills. They also talked about navigating new behavioral challenges. Some providers who work with school-aged children reported delays in reading and math skills. Missy Nichols of Imagination Station Preschool in London, Kentucky spoke at length about the topic.
A couple years out, I’m now getting babies that were born during COVID, and those children are very different. Those children are extremely clingy. Those children don’t have social skills. They don’t have—they’ve not learned the ability to take turns, per se. To wait. Even if you’re talking literally for a two minute span…They’ve not had the opportunities to learn how to self-regulate. They’ve not had opportunities to self-soothe. Just in general, when you go to the grocery store or when a child walks into a birthday party, when—there are so many mindless activities that we did that shaped our children even when we didn’t realize they were being shaped. And when all of that was pulled away, there were some life skills that were being taught naturally just through living, that when we were concentrated with just our family, it wasn’t happening.
Nevertheless, providers are coming up with solutions. After our recorded interview, Missy explained to me how she encourages her kids to make shapes from playdough to develop their fine motor skills. She has also started using a timer—it’s a way for the children to start to understand how much time they have left to engage in a certain activity, which helps them develop self-regulation skills.
Finally, most interviewees had insightful reflections on the state of their profession more broadly. Several people described how workers left the child care profession during the pandemic, and how they’ve not been replaced by new workers. Some interviewees believe that people now see child care as a risky job, as workers are exposed to more germs. Some contend that the job has become more demanding since the pandemic, as workers are having to navigate more behavioral challenges and developmental delays in children.
For some centers, the shortage of workers has meant having to decrease enrollment, leaving parents with even fewer child care options. Sydney Boyd and Amy Bowie of Miss Amy’s, a preschool in Abingdon, Virginia, explained to me that they’ve had to close two out of their four classrooms since the pandemic because they cannot find staff.
I think [the job is] low pay. It’s stressful. [The pandemic] really brought to light the fact that we are a petri dish of germs. And if you have an autoimmune disorder or if you get sick all the time—you know, people don’t want to work somewhere that that’s gonna happen to them. They want a high-paying, safe job. And this is not that. This is in-person work, and it’s demanding.—Amy Bowie
Despite the many challenges of the pandemic, there’s one positive thing that most people shared: their work has become more visible and more valued. Juanita McQuerrey, a home-based child care provider in Oak Hill, West Virginia, reflected on how the state acknowledged the importance of child care during the pandemic.
I’m glad that they finally realized—the state realized—they needed daycare providers. ‘Cause they realized—even [Governor] Justice realized that they needed us. They needed people to take care of their kids.
Jackie Branch of Living Water Child Care & Learning Center in Williamson, West Virginia also said:
Child care has really—not just in West Virginia, but nationwide—has sort of not really been that important…But with COVID, everyone realized the importance of child care. So if anything good did come of COVID, it would only be that. That I feel that the work that we do was really validated by so many people who thought, ‘Well we thought you were babysitters.’ You know, they don’t understand that you’re educators, that you’re nurturers. That, you know, you’re doing all these multi-faceted things that people don’t realize that happens in a child care setting.
This increase in visibility during the pandemic led to greater material support from federal and state governments—at least in the short-term. Some interviewees reported that, through government assistance programs, they were able to increase pay for employees and invest in much-needed infrastructure updates, without passing the cost burden on to working families. And many families received extra payment assistance from the government.
Why are Child Care Workers’ Experiences Crucial for Understanding the Pandemic
Child care workers are important for our understanding of the pandemic for a variety of reasons. Providers interviewed for this project illustrate the precarious situation almost all frontline workers faced: risking their personal safety and the safety of their families for their jobs. Child care workers illuminate the heavy moral and ethical decisions that so many frontline workers had to make. They had to ask themselves questions such as, “What is my responsibility to those I serve and to my community?” and “Am I doing enough to keep myself and those I’m responsible for safe?”
These interviewees also demonstrate how federal and state safety guidelines were not a one-size-fits-all solution. Child care providers had to tailor governmental guidelines to meet their communities’ needs. Workers displayed their creativity, skill, and knowledge as they found ways to navigate the ever-changing challenges of the pandemic.
The pandemic was a time when many of us reconsidered the importance and value of a variety of professions. The child care workers interviewed for this project spoke to this when describing how they finally felt that, during the pandemic, their profession received recognition that was long overdue. Other occupations—such as health care workers, grocery store workers, mail carriers—were also lauded for the crucial role they fill in our daily lives.
Furthermore, a look at the child care industry illuminates the critical need for a social safety net. Many of the providers spoke about how increases in government assistance programs that were directed at child care improved the quality of life for both workers and families. Without that assistance, many would have had to close up shop. This proved a galvanizing experience. Several interviewees described how, since the start of the pandemic, they’ve turned their attention toward advocacy work, petitioning state and federal legislature for more funding directed at child care.
Tiffany Gale is the owner of Miss Tiffany’s Early Childhood Education House in Weirton, West Virginia, which she started out of her home in 2019. At the beginning of the pandemic, she quickly pivoted to advocating for child care.
I was making trips to talk to our state legislature. And it was a lot for a one-woman-show [laughs], who is also a business owner…We have a 60-day legislative session, and during that legislative session, it was a lot. And I think I just realized that this is not by any means going to be a one-woman-show, and we need all-hands-on-deck.
I got a list of all of the [child care] providers in the state and just started friend-requesting them on Facebook, and asking them to join the Facebook group. I had previously been emailing them, though…and then I just thought, you know what, it would just be easier if I created a Facebook group for anyone who wanted to be a part of this, kind of—I don’t know, maybe movement or like, collective—to get things changed for child care in the state.
Finally, the child care workers I interviewed for this project remind us of the sustained impact of the pandemic, and the ways it has changed us. This includes difficult or negative by-products such as ongoing delays in children’s learning and development. But it also includes potentially positive outcomes, such as some sustained governmental support for the child care industry. There’s no way to know how this will continue to play out in the future, but the reports given by this group of child care workers are an important snapshot of how communities in rural Central Appalachia are navigating the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Works Cited:
Child Care Aware of America. “Demanding Change: Repairing our Child Care System.” Child Care Aware of America. Retrieved on May 15, 2024. https://www.childcareaware.org/demanding-change-repairing-our-child-care-system/.
Coffey, Maureen. “Rural Communities Need Federal Child Care Investments.” Center for American Progress. Retrieved on May 15, 2024. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/rural-communities-need-federal-child-care-investments/#:~:text=In%20fact%2C%20a%20new%20Center,than%20the%20general%20U.S.%20population.
Coffey, Maureen & Khattar, Rose. “The Child Care Sector Is Still Struggling To Hire Workers.” Center for American Progress. Retrieved May 15, 2024. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-child-care-sector-is-still-struggling-to-hire-workers/
Data USA. “Childcare Workers.” Data USA. Retrieved on May 15, 2024. https://datausa.io/profile/soc/childcare-workers.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “All Employees, In Thousands, Child Care Services, Seasonally Adjusted, 2020-2024.” BLS Data Viewer. Retrieved May 15, 2024. https://beta.bls.gov/dataViewer/view/timeseries/CES6562440001.