The first year since the mayor’s big push on helping working families with their kids

In New York City and across the country, families are too often asked to make an impossible decision — choosing between your career or your children. With either skyrocketing prices or seats too far away, our child care system was not working for working families. That’s why nearly a year ago, Mayor Adams put forth a vision­­­­ of accessible, affordable, and equitable child care system in our multi-billion dollar blueprint.

For the mayor and many of us in his administration, this call was deeply personal. We knew first-hand the struggles that our parents had faced juggling multiple jobs while raising their families — all without the support of a strong child care system.

Even worse, the pandemic transformed these challenges into a crisis. Child care costs were too high while available spots were too few. Our city’s child care voucher system was clogged with a bureaucratic backlog of applications. This system also held economic implications. Research found that nearly 375,000 parents left their jobs or downshifted their careers during the pandemic because they could not access child care, robbing our city of $23 billion in lost economic output.

Our child care system was failing. It was failing providers, parents, and, above all, our children, denying them vital opportunities to play, learn, and grow.

We knew we had to do better — and here is where we are a year later.

We successfully cleared the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) child care voucher waitlist and invited more than 36,000 parents whose applications had been stuck to finally begin applying for affordable care again. We expanded eligibility for child care assistance, helped secure a landmark increase in state funding, and reduced the maximum amount that low-income families must pay for child care.

When we launched our blueprint, the average annual co-payment per child in New York was nearly $1,300. Today, it is just a bit more than $170. When the mayor talks about getting stuff done, that is what he means.

Ensuring that families can afford child care is critical; ensuring that they can find and access that child care is too. Unfortunately, more than half our youngest New Yorkers live in “child care deserts” where children vastly outnumber the available child care seats. The Adams administration took the fight to Albany to advocate for an innovative tax break that encourages residential and commercial property owners to refashion their property into child care centers, and we won. This abatement has the potential to add thousands of additional child care seats across the five boroughs.

Instead of trying to navigate a dense labyrinth of agencies and applications to apply for child care vouchers, families can now use the streamlined MyCity portal that unites a vast array of city services, including child care, in one location. More than 17,000 New Yorkers have signed up for MyCity, and approximately 8,000 families have already used MyCity to apply for child care. By pulling city government into the 21st century, we’ve made finding affordable, accessible child care easier than ever.

But our blueprint was not just focused on affordability and access. We knew we had to prioritize equity as well. Our poorest families — including many Black, Brown, and Asian families — have been forced to enroll their children in marginal programs. Too many others cannot afford a child care program at all.

To address these staggering disparities, ACS is prioritizing outreach in districts with the highest concentrations of poverty. In neighborhoods from East Harlem to Kingsbridge Heights, we are working to ensure more parents are made aware of these critical child care resources.

This blueprint is an essential investment in our city, one that supports today’s workforce by providing parents with vital child care services and strengthens tomorrow’s workforce by laying the foundation for a successful career. At a moment in which New York is experiencing a powerful economic renaissance, recovering 99% of pre-pandemic jobs and helping steer emerging industries like green technology, programs that provide child care are an essential reason why.

Finally, we launched the city’s first ever Office of Child Care and Early Childhood Education to institutionalize the changes we made. The office coordinates planning among city agencies; foster innovation in partnership with families, providers, and the private sector; and promotes effective communication, policy advocacy, and public engagement.

Parents have a right to child care. Your city government has a responsibility to help ensure they can access it. Until every child can walk through the doors of an affordable child care program in their neighborhood, we still have more work to do. Collaborating with agencies, advocates, and philanthropic partners, the Adams administration is doing exactly that.

Wright is New York City’s first deputy mayor.