Hi, I'm Erica Pandy, and welcome to Axios Recap, where we dig into one big story.

It's Thursday, October 28th, and we're focused on child care.

There's a labor shortage plaguing many industries across the board, as millions of people left the workforce during the pandemic, and millions more are leaving

their jobs and switching careers. Child care centers are especially struggling to find candidates

for open roles, because these are typically low-wage and in-person jobs. A new report from Indeed

says interest in child care jobs has gone down 15% since before the pandemic. And while working

parents make up a third of the U.S.

workforce, many can't find affordable child care or have seen their child care facility get

shut down due to COVID. Meanwhile, schools, which are also a vital child care solution,

are continuing to go back and forth with remote learning and in-person, and as a result,

parents, especially mothers,

are dealing with even more stress and losing even more work hours.

How long will the pandemic affect working parents?

In a moment, Northeastern University economics professor Alicia Modestino on the state of child care in America.

And we're joined now by economics professor Alicia Modestino at Northeastern University on the state of the child care industry.

Hey, Alicia.

Hi. It's nice to be here.

So Alicia, you and I have chatted a lot about this in the last now almost two years.

And I think putting this in context for our listeners is going to be a great thing.

We've talked about the struggles working parents have gone through, but how much of the U.S. workforce do working parents represent?

So child care is really an important concern for a large share of the workforce with about a third of the workforce or 50 million workers living with a child under the age of 14 in their household. And so that's typically any child under the age of 14 is one that we would assume would require some

kind of supervision. And so there would be some kind of need for child care in that household.

...