Rachel speaks with Sara Bradley, Executive Director of York Day Early Learning in York, Pennsylvania, about a problem most people in the mental health field have never thought about — and that affects millions of the patients they see every day.
The American child care system was built around a standard workday. For the nearly 20 percent of workers who work nonstandard hours — overnight shift workers, first responders, healthcare workers, contract workers, and others — that system simply does not work. York Day is one of the very few organizations in the country trying to change that. Founded more than 90 years ago, York Day has spent the last six months piloting a 24-hour early learning program that meets families where they actually are rather than where the system assumed they would be.
Sara walks Rachel through what building that program has actually looked like — the surveys, the pivots, the assumptions that turned out to be wrong, and the ones that turned out to be right. What started as an attempt to run a clean second shift became a fully fluid 24-hour model because the community did not need a program with a clean start and stop — it needed one that could absorb the reality of shift work schedules. York Day is now 18 months into a pilot designed to produce a replicable blueprint that other organizations across the country can use.
The conversation also covers the behavioral health dimensions of child care access — the chronic stress, anxiety, and depression that parents experience when reliable care is unavailable, the six million children in the United States living with a parent with co-occurring substance use disorder and mental illness, and why for families in recovery, child care is not a peripheral issue but often a direct factor in whether a parent can sustain sobriety. For clinicians, the message is direct: the parents sitting across from you in your office are being shaped by forces that start well before they walk through your door.
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