Standards of Infant/Toddler Care Timeline- Markia Long by Markia Long

1890s

mlong23_5 — 2025-08-28 16:48:20 UTC

A group of New York philanthropists who created a child nursery was created alongside a Child's building in Chicago. This group would then founded National Federation of Day Nurseries (NFDN) in 1898.

1900s-1930s

mlong23_5 — 2025-08-28 17:08:09 UTC

When the 1st chief of the U.S. Children’s Bureau was names, Julia Lathrop wanted policies that would help mothers to be able to support their children from home. This would result in multiple groups would be able to pass legislators state by state to give for child care benefits. There was still a big issue with lower-income and different races not being able to receive said benefits. Child centers were not able to keep up with the demand of more child care due to the lack of funding for middle class communities.

1930s-1940s

mlong23_5 — 2025-08-28 17:25:45 UTC

During this time, the Great Depression and and the start of WWII, the amount of child care centers were declining at a rapid rate with over 200 centers closing down (with less than 300 centers remaining). A new group called Emergency Nursery Schools (ENS) was created with the main purpose to give unemployed teachers jobs. Over 30,00 schools with 64,00 students were established to combat the job crisis. As time went by, the National Association for Nursery Education would regularly oversee how these teachers were doing the curricular and this in turn cause said educators to leave for higher paying jobs because of they wanted them to adopt a "less-structured approach" to teaching kids. As a result of high turnover rated and lack of resources to implicate the new teaching methods, over 1,000 schools were forced to close by 1942.

During and After WWII

mlong23_5 — 2025-08-28 18:35:52 UTC

In 1941 Congress passed the Lanham Act. This act would create facilities in places impacted by war, but 3 years later, this also included child care. While that happened, 6 million dollars were used to help convert the remaining ENS centers into child care facilities. Due to the high standards set by the government, many of the centers were not meeting anything and were forced to close down by 1944. In 1954, congress introduced a tax deduction which allowed families making $4,500 to deduct up to $600 for child care from their income taxes. And by 1958, the ICC ( Inter-City Committee for Day Care of Children) was created.

1980s-1990s

mlong23_5 — 2025-08-28 19:38:13 UTC

Under the Reagan Administration, the spreading of funds were drastically changed with low-income getting less than middle & upper class families which caused a disconnect for low-income families to receive child care. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 and help from the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) was established during this time. Several small programs and CCDBG, congress would combine them all into Child Care and Development Fund.

Present Day

mlong23_5 — 2025-08-28 19:48:00 UTC

Despite the more public funds that have been created to give kids access to education, there's still a huge barrier between the low-class & middle-class and higher class Americans. Americans compare poorly education wise compared to countries like France, Sweden, and Denmark. Strikes across American have been an issue among the education filled and will NOT get better unless the system is reworked in order to satisfy everybody.