Like many working parents, Maria Hess has felt the stress of taking care of her three kids at home while also performing at work amid the COVID-19 crisis. (Photo courtesy of Maria Hess)

Crying in the closet, breaking up sibling fights, Zoom bloopers. Maria Hess is dealing with it all as she cares for three kids, ages 9, 11 and 13, while working from home.

Hess, a partner at Seattle startup studio Madrona Venture Labs, knows she’s fortunate. Other families are facing challenges such as layoffs and potentially life-threatening illness due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But like many working parents, she’s at a loss for solutions with schools closed, summer camps canceled, and few childcare options available.

“We’ve had cereal or pancakes for dinner more times than I’d care to admit,” said Hess, a single parent.

Madrona Venture Labs is part of a larger entrepreneurial movement seeking to address this growing societal problem. A recent spinout from the studio, Weekdays, is one of several companies developing new solutions to help parents and families grapple with consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. The company launched earlier this year with a service that uses technology to match in-home providers with parents, and has seen increased demand in recent months.

Since the coronavirus outbreak hit the U.S., parents have faced the herculean task of keeping up at work in between feeding, entertaining, and educating their kids. Many daycare facilities closed temporarily. Even as they start to reopen under strict safety guidelines issued by each state, some parents are worried about sending their children back and potentially getting sick.

That could lead some providers to shut down permanently due to lack of revenue in a traditionally low-margin business.

Others parents simply can’t afford the cost of a nanny or daycare, especially with shaky job security. And asking grandparents to help is problematic given that older generations are at higher risk for severe illness.

The result is a childcare crisis affecting both parents and childcare providers that could pose problems for companies across the nation.

A deepening disparity

Depending on the supply of providers and whether schools remain closed this fall, the crisis could force parents to quit their jobs so they can take care of their kids, a burden that some say will fall unfairly on working women.

It’s also creating a disparity between colleagues at work, as those without children are able to put in longer uninterrupted hours during shelter-in-place orders, while parents are facing constant distractions at home.

The situation is even more dire for lower-paid workers or those who can’t do their job from home, such as an Amazon warehouse worker or a Microsoft shuttle bus driver.

“There’s a lot of despair right now,” said Colby Underwood, co-owner of Nanny Parent Connection, the largest community of parents, nannies, and babysitters in the Seattle region.

Leading voices such as Melinda Gates say the problem will affect “our country’s ability to safely reopen.”

In an op-ed published by The Washington Post earlier this month, Gates addressed working women and the childcare crisis.

“The data tell us that the unpaid caregiving work done by women in their households is, in fact, one of the biggest barriers they face to equal opportunity in the workforce,” Gates wrote. “Post-pandemic, they risk falling even further behind.”

Gates also called on Congress to enact a national paid family and medical leave policy, and said remote work policies “if kept in place, could actually improve recruitment and retention of female employees in the long run.”

Challenges for childcare centers and companies

Even before COVID-19 hit the U.S., more than half of the country was in a “childcare desert,” said Shauna Causey, CEO of Weekdays. There weren’t enough childcare providers to match the demand. “Now it’s getting exponentially worse,” she said, with more parents needing help and fewer options available.

Seattle startup Leg Up aims to help parents find daycare, after-school care and classes, enrichment programs, and other activities. It provides free tools for childcare providers that assist in managing their operations. Earlier this month the company worked with HR leaders on a guide for employers to help small and medium-sized businesses support working parents and caregivers.

Leg Up CEO and co-founder Jessica Eggert and her son, Oliver Eggert. (Photo courtesy of Jessica Eggert)

Even with additional childcare-related government funding from the CARES Act and other sources, Leg Up CEO Jessica Eggert said many providers will still end up shutting down. Relying on large corporations such as Bright Horizons, which is starting to reopen with new safety measures, won’t be adequate.

“If we lose childcare centers, it’s going to be hard for employees to return to work,” Eggert said.

Employers should step in and address the issue if they want to avoid turnover, Eggert said, noting that companies will need to start providing childcare support for their employees by subsidizing the high monthly costs or offering other resources.

A March survey from Cleo, a startup that helps working parents, found that 93% of human resource professionals say their company is providing new family benefits to its employees during the COVID-19 outbreak.

However, some aren’t as bullish about companies coming up with creative ways to help working parents.

“There is a lot of just shrugging of the shoulders happening right now,” said Underwood, of Nanny Parent Connection, who has been speaking about the issue with HR leaders at large Seattle-area companies. He said offering a $100 per day stipend for daycare or a nanny, for example, could give employees several hours of focused work time.

Colby Underwood, co-owner of Nanny Parent Connection. (Photo courtesy of Nanny Parent Connection)

“Companies that can afford it need to take a hard look at something like that,” Underwood said.

Speaking on a GeekWire webinar this week, Zillow Group CEO Rich Barton said the childcare dilemma is a “really, really awful problem.” For now, he said the Seattle real estate company — which will allow remote work until at least 2021 — is being flexible with working hours and providing backup childcare support.

“This is not sustainable in perpetuity; we’re going to need to have long-term productivity out of people,” Barton said. “But in this weird time where we have difficulty planning for the future …  we’ve invested a lot in these employees who are parents. It is not time to disinvest, it is time to continue our investment.”

Axiom CEO Elena Donio, who also spoke on the webinar, said she’s asking managers to consider moving work schedules around to accommodate for working parents. For example, scheduling important team meetings to early or late in the day.

Axiom CEO Elena Donio. (Axiom Photo)

“Until childcare options are open and schools are open, this is going to be a problem we have to navigate day to day,” Donio said. “It’s super important to not let caregivers back away from this professional moment that they are all capable of.”

Microsoft changed its benefits package for parents in response to COVID-19, Business Insider reported last month.

“We added an additional leave option to give our employees greater flexibility and time off as they face extended school closures: the 12-week Paid Pandemic School and Childcare Closure Leave,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “This benefit may be taken on a continuous, reduced, or intermittent basis — for example, it could be used to take leave for 1-2 days per week while remotely working the rest.”

Amazon declined to comment for this story. Unlike other tech stalwarts such as Apple, Facebook, and Alphabet, the Seattle tech giant does not provide backup childcare to employees. Last year Bloomberg reported about a group called “Momazonians” — working mothers at Amazon — who want access to the benefit. Part of their argument is that withholding backup daycare stunts career growth for female workers at Amazon.

Startups search for solutions

Weekdays saw demand surge as the COVID-19 outbreak spread. It began only matching parents to programs with six children or less, including “micro-schools” run by teachers, sometimes in the home of parents.

“We pivoted our business when COVID-19 hit and our business accelerated in a way we could have never anticipated,” Causey said. “We’re building technology as fast as we can to support the new demands.”

Weekdays CEO Shauna Causey and her son. (Weekdays Photo)

If there’s any silver lining to this messy situation, it could potentially encourage and enable tighter-knit communities that lean on each other as safety nets. That’s the hope of Avni Patel Thompson, an entrepreneur who previously founded Seattle on-demand childcare startup Poppy, which shut down in 2018.

Poppy was unable to find a sustainable and scalable business model that could keep prices low for parents and pay caregivers adequately. Larger macro issues with the childcare industry — what parents are willing to pay and what caregivers expect to earn — made it difficult for Poppy to grow revenue and margins, even with the help of technology.

Patel Thompson is now heading up a new company in Vancouver, B.C. called Modern Village that is building software to help manage family logistics. She sees the potential for families to create “pods” that share various responsibilities, such as taking all the kids in the neighborhood to soccer practice or helping host a Zoom education session.

“There is an opportunity, and frankly a need, to be innovating and building in this space,” she said. “Otherwise, it’s not going to be pretty.”

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