Every day, as I move among early childhood programs across New Jersey, what stands out most isn’t just what happens in the classroom. It’s the way educators show up for families.
They don’t support children as they learn to speak, build relationships, and manage emotions. They help parents navigate one of the most important stages of their child’s life. They create consistency, trust and a sense of stability that carries beyond the classroom and into the home.
That is the part of this work often missed.
Child care doesn’t get the credit it deserves. Too often, it’s still viewed as babysitting or something separate from “real” education. In fact, some of the most critical learning happens between birth and age 5, and early childhood educators are part of that every day. They help shape language, behavior and relationships, and how children experience learning from the very beginning.
That’s why today, Worthy Wage Day, is complicated.
Second jobs
May 1 is meant to recognize early childhood educators, and that recognition matters. But it also brings attention to a reality that doesn’t match the value of the work.
The wages simply don’t reflect what’s being asked of the people doing that labor.
From where I sit, overseeing several programs, I see how hard providers work to recruit and retain strong staff. These educators are deeply invested in their classrooms and families. They want to stay in the field.
At the same time, child-care providers operate within a system that hasn’t been consistently funded in a way that reflects the work. That reality shows up in program budgets, in what can realistically be offered, and in the limits providers face when trying to retain strong staff. Across the field, leaders are reviewing compensation, reworking budgets and looking for ways to support their teams beyond pay.
While those efforts support workplace culture, they don’t change the underlying financial reality faced by many child-care centers.
Many educators take on additional work in other industries that offer more hours or higher wages, often in retail or food service. Over time, those opportunities can pull them from early childhood education altogether.
Three tenets
That is a big part of the child-care crisis in New Jersey today. One reason that affordable, high-quality child care is hard for parents to find is that talented early childhood educators are forced to leave the profession.
It’s why I support the work of Start Strong NJ and its recently released “Blueprint for Affordable Child Care: New Jersey Doesn’t Work Without It,” which is grounded in three core ideas:
• Affordable child care for every family that needs it
• Compensation for early childhood educators that reflects their role as professionals
• Recognition of child care as essential economic infrastructure that must be funded accordingly
It would be easy to dismiss the challenges child -are programs face as a staffing problem. But what we’re really seeing is the result of a system that isn’t structured or funded to align with its impact.
Early childhood education is a public good. It enables parents to work. It supports the economy. It builds the foundation for lifelong learning and development. But we continue to fund child care as though it were a private responsibility.
Other states are increasingly investing directly in the early childhood workforce, recognizing that compensation isn’t a side issue. It’s central to the field’s stability.
In New Jersey, we’re still working toward that level of alignment — toward a system that reflects the importance of this work.
On Worthy Wage Day, the question isn’t whether we appreciate early childhood educators. The question is whether our policies reflect that appreciation.
Right now, they don’t.
Until that changes, we’ll continue to lose the very people who make child-care work. And there’s nothing worthy about that.
