The Dismal State of Child Care

In
September, the Better Life Lab at New America released The New America Care
Report examining the cost, quality, and availability of child care across the
United States. The information contained in the report is critical and
eye-opening but also dispiriting in that it exposes the many holes and failures
in this country’s child care system. There can be a mythology surrounding child
care that it might be broken for the poor but everyone else manages to get by.
As a reasonably successful, college-educated mother of three this has certainly
not been my experience. My trajectory through the child care landscape echoes
many of the findings of the report, most importantly that this child care
system we have in place really isn’t working for anyone.

I am a single
mother with a six-figure student loan debt and two heavily laden credit cards,
much of that taken on to pay for my children’s early education. Unless
something changes, I most likely won’t be able to help my children with college
because I will still be paying off their pre-school. In a child care landscape
characterized by high costs, limited government subsidies, a low level (11
percent) of nationally accredited establishments, and frequent difficulty in
finding age appropriate care, mine is just one of many families whose financial
lives have been permanently altered in a quest to find quality affordable care
for our young children.

When my
oldest was born I was working as a freelance writer. I lived in Seattle at the
time and Washington State had child care subsidies for working parents. Qualification
entailed a lot of paperwork—bank statements, eligibility forms, pay stubs—and
several visits to the local DHS office. The system was not conducive to anyone
working irregular hours or for more than one employer. But eventually I was
able to send my son and then a year later my daughter to a high quality local
child care center for between $50 and $300 a month.

Things
changed when I decided to go back to school less than a year after my daughter
was born. I wanted a profession more reliable than freelancing so I knew I
would be able to provide for my children in the future. By mutual agreement their
father wasn’t in the picture financially, so for my first year of law school I
continued to work so I could hold onto that subsidy. I took assignments as a
journalist while carrying a full course load and caring for two toddlers. It
wasn’t easy, but I don’t think it was especially remarkable either. I’ve spoken
to many, many families who make extensive sacrifices in terms of time, money, and
quality of life in the search for affordable high quality child care.

The
summer before my second year of school, when I tried to re-qualify for the
subsidy I was denied. Budget cuts were slicing away at social services and assistance
was no longer available to people who worked at home. Or to students.

Child
care subsidies, such as those funded through the federal Child Care and
Development Block Grant, are typically administered at the state level. They
usually provide vouchers that serve as payment to pre-qualified providers, who
take big losses on each subsidized child since the state-set reimbursement
rates do not cover the actual cost to the provider of caring for the child. Income
eligibility levels vary by state but are consistently low, meaning many
struggling families remain closed out. A 2015 study by the National Women’s Law
Center found that a family with an income above 150 percent of the federal
poverty level—or $30,135 for a family of three—could not qualify for assistance
in seventeen states. There is so little money invested in existing federal subsidies
that they only cover one in six eligible children. Funds come and go with state
budget adjustments and the review process can be so long and stressful that I
actually felt less anxious about child care when I was paying for it on my own.

After
the panic subsided, I called my school’s financial aid office. They told me about
childcare subsidies available through the university. The subsidies only
covered about a third of the cost, but I was lucky they existed at all. Child
care is a major hurdle for most student parents. There are about 4.8 million
college students who are also parents. But less than half of 4-year or
community colleges provide any on-campus child care and many of those slots are
taken up by the children of faculty. If student parents are eligible for
subsidies—which they rarely are—state subsidy programs cover only a narrow
subset. Some states, like Georgia, offer subsidies only to students in
community college or technical school but not in four-year colleges or
universities.

I was
also lucky in that I found a daycare just blocks from the university. As noted
in the Care Report, availability is a huge and often difficult to quantify
aspect of the child care puzzle. In urban areas, child care centers can fill
early and have long waitlists. In rural areas, the closest available care might
be many miles away. The inability to find age-appropriate care nearby when it’s
needed further heightens the time and money a family must invest.

There
was one catch with my new facility: they didn’t provide infant care. When our
subsidy was denied I was six months pregnant with my third child, so when he
was two days old he started law school with me and attended through the quarter.
He was waitlisted at a facility about 15 minutes from our home and a slot
opened up when he was twelve weeks old. I wasn’t ready to let him go five days just
yet but there was no guarantee space would be available when I needed it. So,
from April until late June, I paid for full-time care, though he only attended
two days a week.  That year my child care
expenses rang in at just under $45,000.

Let me
break here to explain one thing. I have always worked, even while I was in
school. I went back to school to hitch myself high enough into the middle class
to support my children. I am a single mother but I am also a white collar
professional – there are plenty of two-parent families out there whose combined
income is equal to or less than mine. I am today’s middle class. So the easiest
response might be to write me off as soon as you heard about that third baby.
“Don’t have children if you can’t afford them.” We need to look beyond that.
The answer to our child care problem can’t be that only rich people get to have
kids.

According
to the Care Report, the average cost of child care in the U.S. is shocking—higher
than the average cost of in-state college tuition, and one-fifth of the median
household income. Families shoulder 60 percent of these costs, with the
government picking up 39 percent and business and philanthropy just 1 percent. The
financial repercussions for families can be devastating. I finished school with
debt ranging into six figures. Children’s birthdays came and went with few
gifts and no parties, friends brought bags of groceries I wished I could have
turned away but didn’t.

I had
been offered a job in Washington DC, so after I graduated from law school we
prepared to head across country. In my search for accredited daycare I found exactly
one that had space for my three-year-old daughter but they could not take my son,
who was almost two. I finally was referred to a newly opened center, about 20
minutes from our apartment. The cost was astronomical—close to $2500 a month—but
he would be safe and well-cared for. The two daycares plus before and after
school care for my kindergartner consumed over half my take-home salary. The
tally for child care for that next year: over $40,000.

To get
by, we ate oatmeal packets from Costco and showed up at birthday parties with
no gifts. I deferred my student loans, and maxed out my credit cards. My generous
mother, who was in the process of selling her home and downsizing, pulled us
off the financial precipice a few times.

I’m
sharing my story not because it’s unique or unusual, but because it’s not. There
are 12 million children under the age of five in this country who require child
care. That means tens of thousands of families doing what I do: cobbling
together arrangements, seeping into debt, praying like hell that their children
get the right groundwork in place because education is the key to everything. These
days, my two oldest are in school, where I pay almost $1,000 a month for before
and after-care. With only one child in full-time care, my child care expenses
are still more than I pay in rent.   

I’m sharing this to remind
legislators and policy makers that we need help. Most of all, I’m sharing to
encourage other families to speak out. Because statistics are important, but
the people with the power to change things need to understand, from those who
live it, how debilitating the state of child care in America has become.