Rochester resident Matt Knutson is the communications and events director for United Way of Olmsted County.

“The whole child care system seems broken,” I told my wife while writing out the latest check to Gracelyn’s day care. Each month we pay something close to our mortgage payment in child care, and it’s astounding that our day care was one of the most affordable in our area.

To be clear, I’m not faulting the day care center. They seem to have a competent staff that I’m relatively certain are not making as much money as they deserve. This is a trend much larger than one center in my community. It stretches across Minnesota and even the entire nation. I was surprised to learn Minnesota actually ranked relatively high compared to other states, coming in at No. 6 in The Care Index, a report from New America and Care.com.

The Care Index identified three pillars of care: cost, quality and availability. Many families struggle with all three, and the relationship between all three is crucial to successfully preparing the next generation for success.

Child care that is too costly keeps low-income children from attending quality care. When families of low income have children starting kindergarten unprepared, they’re less likely to succeed in future grades, and more likely to not graduate on time. Thus, the cycle perpetuates itself.

Everyone wants their child(ren) to receive quality child care, but many cannot afford it. Quality early childhood teachers are naturally attracted to jobs that pay more, thus more affordable child care centers are often plagued with a weaker quality and staff turnover. According to the report, “Silva’s experience in Massachusetts reflects that of an entire nation of child care workers. The median hourly wage for child care workers is $9.77 an hour, which places them in only the second percentile of wage earners when all professions are ranked, making it one of the lowest paid professions in the country. Close to one-half (46 percent) of child care workers, compared to about one-quarter (26 percent) of the total U.S. workforce, are on public assistance. Low wages can lead to high teacher burnout, high levels of teacher stress and high teacher turnover.”

That’s not the type of person I want teaching my little girl, and the industry shouldn’t be structured in a way that makes it so difficult for these teachers to succeed.

The availability pillar was something Sera and I encountered in a quest for child care well before Gracelyn was born. We put a deposit down on literally the only child care center that had an opening. Thankfully, we liked what we saw. If we hadn’t, there wasn’t any other alternative. That was scary for me. I would love to see some sort of incentive for more child care providers to enter the market, as there is a clear demand.

A flyer from the U.S. Department of Education shared that your child’s brain development is most significant from birth to age three, and that 90 percent of the brain’s capacity develops before a child reaches age five. This is a crucial time in a child’s life, and we shouldn’t be treating the early childhood education industry as second-tier class if we are expecting our children to rise to higher standards. In 2013, 93.9 percent of fathers and 63.9 percent of mothers with children aged five or younger were in the workforce, likely meaning their children were attending some sort of child care.

What can we do about it? I’m not an expert, but the team who put together The Care Index had several policy recommendations for the state and federal government. I recommend you check out the full report at www.newamerica.org to see what they’re suggesting. I think we can all agree that it’s important for us to take care of our future generations, and right now there’s too many variables in the system that allow children to fall through the cracks. Hopefully, one day in the not too distant future, a child’s family background won’t be the deciding factor for his or her success years down the line.