If you are in a working family and have managed to hold on to your child care during the past two years, you may have the federal government to thank, according to a new report .

Child care providers have faced severe financial pressures during the coronavirus pandemic because of lockdowns and absences that reduced their revenue, as well as the need to invest in expensive new safety measures and, most recently, the high cost of retaining or hiring workers in a super-tight labor market.

Literally tens of thousands of child care providers have downsized or shut down, leaving families scrambling to find alternatives whether its relying on more informal care or just keeping kids at home. Its one reason so many working parents, especially women , have reduced their hours or dropped out of the U.S. workforce entirely .

But the wave of downsizing and closures in the child care industry would have been way more severe if not for the federal government spending many billions of dollars to prop up child care, the new report says.

An Assessment Of The Recent Past, Roughly

The report comes from The Century Foundation , a nonpartisan liberal think tank. By design, the report appeared on Thursday morning, a day before the one-year anniversary of the American Rescue Plan.

ARP, passed by Democrats on a party-line vote and signed into law by President Joe Biden , was the last and biggest of the major COVID-19 relief acts. It included roughly $40 billion in new spending to support child care providers , who could spend the money on worker compensation, physical improvements and paying off debt from the pandemic, among other uses.

About 75,000 providers avoided closure because of the money, the report says, preserving more than 3 million slots. That would work out to about one-third of the nations total supply of child care slots, according to co-author Rasheed Malik , who is director of early childhood policy at the liberal Center for American Progress .