Each day, Claire Suteth shows a better baby's daycare and goes through a ritual that is wholly unfamiliar to me, a person with a couple of kids, and 10 years of drop-offs and pickups under my belt.

One of the workers comes out, the caregivers comes out with a little forehead thermometer

and checks my daughter's forehead temperature because they won't take any kids if they have

even a low fever. And then they take her from you and take her inside and you cannot go in.

Claire's been inside her daycare exactly twice.

Her daughter's 16 months old.

So when you first start, it's just gut-wrenching and the parents cry, or at least I did.

When my kids were little, I was at my kids' daycare so often that I kind of wished for Claire's reality once or twice.

There was an annual holiday performance, Mother's Day and Father's Day breakfasts, moving

up ceremonies.

Claire's daycare.

It used to be like that, too.

And I know that in pre-pandemic times, they would have like a Halloween party at my daughter's

daycare and like the parents would come.

And it was like this whole thing, which they like the parents would come. And it was like

this whole thing, which they obviously don't do anymore. And I was like, oh, child care and

daycare before the pandemic is completely different than what it is now.

During her working hours, Claire's a reporter for Bloomberg Business Week, and she always knew

child care was a fraught marketplace. But with her daughter, she's gotten this up-close look

at the way the pandemic has been stretching and warping the child care business. She would read

some statistic, like that a third of daycare providers

are considering quitting, for instance. And then she'd go get her kid and realize that statistic

...