Are We Doing Enough to Help Parents Weather the COVID Storm?

Noah Zon and Ken Boessenkool for CD Howe on the ways in which current crisis has had an outsized impact on women with young children, and how governments can help.

The current crisis has had an outsized impact on women with young children. While men with young children have largely recovered their hours of work since the beginning of the pandemic, women with young children have not.

It’s not hard to understand why. Even with re-opened schools and childcare, many families are keeping their kids at home. While online learning is less than ideal, many parents are dissatisfied with the level of safety. And even those sending kids to school or childcare lose weeks of work to isolation and tests because of illness or exposure.