The pay is breathtakingly low: In 2019, the median was $11.65 an hour, or $24,230 a year. The vast majority of early childhood jobs, at least as they’re currently conceived, are not good jobs. So I became a statistic: one of hundreds of thousands of workers who leave early childhood care and education - an umbrella term for home child care, child care centers, and private and public preschools for children under 5 - every year for higher-paying work, whether at the Starbucks down the road or in the K-8 public school system. But I couldn’t survive on the pay long term.
I loved those kids, and I honestly loved the group care environment, which would stand in stark contrast to my long, lonely days as a nanny. When a friend told me about a nanny agency that could get me at least $13 an hour, paid time off, and a stipend for health insurance, how could I say no? I could’ve taken some night classes to get my early childhood accreditation, but that would bump my pay by a dollar, maybe slightly more. My small savings, accumulated over the summer while working at a dude ranch, began to dwindle. I tried to cut costs by grazing on the leftovers of the food provided for the kids for breakfast and lunch.
I was living with three friends in a small house nearby and watched as the $500-a-month rent, plus $80 a month for a subsidized bus pass, ate up the majority of my paycheck. I caught colds and flus from the kids, got the familiar tingle of strep throat, but instead of getting antibiotics, I let it ride out, lucky it didn’t get worse. This was before the Affordable Care Act, and I had no health insurance. The job, as anyone who’s worked in a child care center or preschool can tell you, is incredibly physical I was sore every night in some new way. In the toddler room, where kids were between 1 and 2 years old, another teacher and I handled the care of a dozen squawking, endlessly curious kids. I got the job, which paid $8 an hour - just over the state’s then-minimum wage of $7.16 - almost instantly. Infants, toddlers, 4-year-olds: I’d spent endless hours with them all, sometimes all at once, sometimes even overnight. I’d babysat, usually for around $2 an hour, since fifth grade. Then I saw an advertisement in the local alt-weekly for a teacher’s assistant position at a preschool, just across the street from the University of Washington. After weeks of handing over résumés, I was still unemployed. When I graduated from college in the mid-2000s, I moved to Seattle to find a job waitressing.