COVID-19 Takes a Toll on Working Families

Joelle Wheatley hit her pandemic-parenting rock bottom after her son was sent home from day care for a second time, with the sniffles, due to stricter health guidelines in a symptom-sensitive COVID-19 world.

It was supposed to be Jacob’s first day back after a stressful 10-day home quarantine for another mild symptom that turned out to be harmless. Frustrated, desperate — there were no other care options, and she needed to focus on work — and certain that the 2-year-old’s runny nose and cough were also benign, the Seattle mom...

Four times as many women as men dropped out of the labor force in September, roughly 865,000 women compared with 216,000 men. This validates predictions that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women—and the accompanying child care and school crises—would be severe. In July, a Washington Post article—titled, “Coronavirus child-care crisis will set women back a generation”—pointed out that “[o]ne out of four women who reported becoming unemployed during the pandemic said it was because of a lack of child care—twice the rate among men.”1 In August, CNN ran...