Waging Love: The Documentary
A feature documentary about the people who raise our children — and the system that refuses to pay them.
About the Film
Every working family in America depends on child care. Yet the professionals who provide that care — the teachers, the aides, the directors who show up every morning to nurture, educate, and protect young children — earn wages that place them at the 3rd percentile of all U.S. occupations.
Waging Love is a feature-length documentary that examines this contradiction through the voices of the people who live it.
The film follows early childhood educators across a range of roles, geographies, and backgrounds as they describe the daily reality of doing work they consider essential — and being compensated as though it is not. Through their stories, the film traces the structural forces that created this crisis: a labor market built on gendered and racialized assumptions about the value of care work, a policy landscape that treats child care as a private family expense rather than public infrastructure, and an economy that asks its lowest-paid workers to subsidize its most critical service.
17 Voices. One Story.
At the heart of Waging Love are 17 in-depth interviews with early childhood education professionals. These are not sound bites. They are extended, unfiltered conversations about compensation, identity, sacrifice, and the daily experience of working in a field that society claims to value but refuses to fund.
Interview subjects include classroom teachers, center directors, family child care providers, college instructors, and advocates — spanning a range of experience from first-year educators to thirty-year veterans.
The Sacrifice Economy
Researchers use the term “sacrifice economy” to describe a labor system in which workers accept below-market wages because they feel a moral obligation to the people they serve. In early childhood education, this dynamic is not incidental — it is foundational.
The median hourly wage for ECE educators is $13.07. More than 1 in 8 live below the poverty line. The workforce is disproportionately women and disproportionately women of color.
About the Director
Tim Harper has spent two decades in early childhood education — as a classroom teacher, a center director, a college professor, and a researcher. He currently serves as a Child Development Center Director and teaches ECE courses at De Anza College in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tim holds a Doctorate in Education (EdD) from San Jose State University, where his dissertation research focuses on the intersection of race, compensation, and workforce retention in early childhood education.
Support the Film
Waging Love is independently produced. Your contribution directly funds editing, sound design, original music, data visualization, and distribution.
Currently in post-production. For screening inquiries, press, or partnership opportunities, please contact us.