‘Like paying for a luxury car’: Miami childcare costs holding families back
With the pandemic disrupting the lives of countless South Floridins, families struggle to find — and pay for — childcare.
Given the choice, Jennifer Ruiz would prefer not to work the overnight shift at a 24-hour bakery in Miami.
But the math isn’t in her favor. She can’t afford $160 a week for childcare for her 9month-old daughter. Instead, while relatives care for the baby, Ruiz watches the night sky turn to sunrise behind the glass counter at her $9-an-hour job.
With the average cost of center-based care for a toddler in
Florida at $8,618 annually, paying for care is the second-biggest income guzzler for Miami-Dade families with children, just behind housing. Infant care in the state is even more expensive, averaging around $9,600 a year — roughly 35% of a single parent’s median income.
A family of four, with one infant and one preschooler, would need to budget around $1,105 a month for childcare needs, according to an annual report by United Way.
Childcare affordability has long been an issue locally. Even in the best of times, working parents — most often moms — become skilled jugglers, balancing childcare with unforgiving work hours. The pandemic has only made matters worse. The recently signed COVID stimulus package includes relief for parents and childcare providers, but it’s a short-term measure unlikely to cure the underlying issues.
While men in the United States gained about 16,000 net jobs in December 2020, women lost a net total of 156,000 jobs, according to an analysis of labor data by the National Women’s Law Center.
January data from the Center for American Progress revealed there were around 700,000 fewer parents with a child under 5 in the labor force than there were one year ago. Women make up around three quarters of that number — and childcare issues are feeding the exodus.
Work absentee rates due to childcare issues rose dramatically last year. From September through November 2020, the pandemic led to a 144% increase in childcare-related employee absences compared to the same period in 2019, according to the Center for American Progress report.
But even before the pandemic, parents were feeling the pain. A 2020 countywide survey of community needs shows that finding affordable childcare is a concern for 22% of Miami-Dade County households.
“It’s a big issue even for middle-class families. It’s expensive to have a child in childcare. and if you have two kids most of your wages are going to that,” said Evelio Torres, president and CEO of the county’s Early Learning Coalition.
The coalition’s School Readiness Program provides federally funded childcare vouchers that allow low-income working families to pay a sliding fee for care. Around 20,000 families are currently receiving vouchers in Miami-Dade and Monroe counties. To initially qualify, families must have an income under 150% of the poverty threshold: That’s $39,300 or less for a family of four.
Demand for these vouchers far outstrips supply. Statewide, only 15% of eligible Florida families receive them. Then there are the families that don’t qualify — but just barely. In MiamiDade, nearly 40% of families earn too much to qualify for vouchers yet earn too little to comfortably pay for basic necessities such as childcare, according to research from United Way. Experts call these families “ALICE,” or “asset limit, income constrained, employed.”
Locally and elsewhere around the country, employers, agencies and companies are getting creative to provide safe and affordable childcare for working parents. One company has created a web portal to link parents with care centers. Some are finding on-site centers boost employee retention. Others have crafted alliances that share administration costs, helping small centers keep the lights on.
For some families, the pandemic has been something of a backhanded blessing, giving some more flexibility as workfrom-home has increasingly become the norm. That flexibility is what allowed Vanessa Arango to keep her job as an executive assistant at an engineering firm in Kendall. Arango was paying $180 a week to have her 3-year-old daughter indaycare full-time. The $720 monthly bill was her largest expense after rent.
In a good year, Arango makes around $55,000. But with Covid-19 came fewer hours and a pay cut, so she cut back on daycare and began paying $150 a week — still a hefty price tag for her.
“That was for a rinkydink shopping mall daycare,” Arango said. “For the good ones, the Montessoris that have capacity, it’s $1,400 a month. I cannot afford that.”
When the pandemic shut down the childcare center her daughter attended, Arango was unable to find a substitute in her price range. Because of her childcare issues, she asked her employer to let her work from home part-time.
But she wasn’t prepared for how stressful it would be, she said. As a single mom, she’s largely on her own on days when she has to go into the office. More than once, babysitters have called out at the last minute, leaving Arango to rely, reluctantly, on her elderly parents for care.
When childcare is too much of a cost to bear, some parents make tough choices. Those include dropping out of the workforce altogether, said Gladys Montes, group vice president of United Way of Miami-Dade’s Center for Excellence in Early Education.
“It is very hard for families to find quality childcare when the dollars are not there for them,” Montes said. The result is that many local families fall back on what experts call the “friends, family and neighborhood network.”
“It’s not a very secure network because at any point for any reason it can break and you find yourself without childcare, which affects your possibility of going to work,” Montes said. “We know and hear of families that lose their jobs or quit because those arrangements they had are no longer there.”
For low- and moderateincome families, both the cost of care and the stops in employment can haunt them forever, said Holly Bullard, analyst at the Florida Policy Institute.
“This is something that impacts everybody with kids, and it’s one of the great challenges of economic mobility for Florida,” Bullard said.
An online tool created by the Center for American Progress calculates the hidden cost of a failing childcare system. A 26-year-old woman making $44,000 who leaves the workforce, for instance, stands to lose more than her straight salary. Taking off five years to care for her child could spell an income loss of $706,778 over time. The calculator takes into account lost wages as well as losses in retirement, benefits and wage growth.
These potential losses were no surprise to Emma Harris.
After moving to Miami in 2019, Harris spent a good part of the pandemic pregnant and looking for childcare options. The 31-year-old new mom had seen half her female friends quit working after giving birth, but Harris, an entrepreneur, knew she wanted to stay in the workforce.
Before her 4-month-old son was born last November, she’d already figured out local childcare centers were out of her desired price range; paying for care would eat up a third of her income.
“If I stop working, the longer I’m away the harder it would be to get back into it,” said Harris. “I would lose connections that I have day-to-day.”
Harris and her husband are both working from home. She’s getting her business, Kiddo, a jobs site for early childhood educators, off the ground. The couple spend the day switching back and forth between the dining table and the bedroom depending on who has the most important Zoom call. The situation became so untenable that they finally caved and hired a nanny a few days a week.
The added help improves things slightly, but Harris still ends up working late into the night most days, taking advantage of every hour her newborn Mason isn’t strapped to her chest in a baby carrier — as he is for most of the day during her work calls.
About 200 childcare locations closed in MiamiDade County over the course of 2020, according to state data. The minimum wage hike is expected to further chip away at childcare affordability as centers increase prices to compensate for added payroll expenses.
For around 160,000 Miami-Dade workers in service occupations such as healthcare and food service, physically attending work will always be a requirement, pandemic or not. Where will they go for childcare?
“For them, remote work is not an option. If they don’t have access to childcare, their only option is to stay out of the workforce,” said Maria Ilcheva, assistant director of planning and operations at Florida International University’s Jorge M. Pérez Metropolitan Center.
And that’s exactly what they’re doing, according to a nationwide survey by the Social Policy Institute at the Washington University in St. Louis. In all, 32% of adults said they are less likely to return to work due to a lack of childcare, according to the report published last fall. The number was even higher for Latino households, at 39%.
Nearly a quarter of respondents reported losing a job or income due to lack of childcare during the pandemic. The effects were concentrated in Hispanic families, lowincome households and families with children under 5.
But for families with young children, having one parent stay home is often the only option that even makes financial sense.
That was the case for Samantha Meyer. She earned between $45,000 and $50,000 in her years as an elementary school teacher in South Florida. After her son was born, she struggled to find childcare that accommodated her early morning schedule. Many of her coworkers faced the same issue, she said.
“Most of them relied on family members,” said Meyer. “One coworker jumped from her sister to her mom to her motherin-law all week – every day was someone new, and she ultimately decided to stay home.”
Eventually, after spending $650 each week for a nanny, Meyer did the same.
“At the end of the day I wasn’t being paid enough to cover childcare,” said Meyer, who’s eight months pregnant with her second child. “We’re making more money by my staying home because it evens out.”
Moderate income families that don’t qualify for childcare vouchers and whose jobs don’t allow them to work from home are perhaps the most trapped when it comes to childcare in Miami.
For years, a local partnership between the Early Learning Coalition and The Children’s Trust has made an effort to catch some of those families in the county. The Trust invests $8 million annually in childcare scholarships for families earning up to 300% of the federal poverty level — $79,500 for a family of four.
Families that receive the scholarship pay $70 a week for care in one of
154 pre-approved centers identified as high quality that are scattered throughout the county.
As of February, there were 896 children receiving the scholarship in South Florida.
“There are thousands of families that potentially qualify, but there’s not an unlimited source of money,” said Rachel Spector, associate director of programs at The Children’s Trust.
The scholarship gave Jennyfer Lopez, 33, a shot at staying in a career that’s helping her raise her children. An accountant for eight years, Lopez is on the brink of a promotion at the trade association where she works in Miami.
But the mom of three, including two 8-monthold twins, would’ve been forced to be a stay-athome mom if she had no assistance for childcare. She said her career would have suffered and that upcoming promotion would’ve been out of the question.
“It’s like paying for a luxury car,” Lopez said of childcare expenses, counting up the roughly $250 to $300 she would’ve had to spend on care for each twin alone. More than 50% of her income would go toward care for her three children. The scholarship allows her to pay $140 a week for all three.
“If I didn’t get the scholarship, it would be better for me to stay home and take care of all three,” Lopez said. She was able to keep her kids in care throughout the pandemic while working from home most days, which has allowed her to focus more intently on her job.
Focusing on anything these days is a struggle for Ruiz, the night-shift bakery worker. While she doesn’t like coffee, she spends her shifts sipping cortaditos to stay awake.
By the time she gets home, her daughter is already up and bustling about. Ruiz is bracing herself for the coming months when the baby will learn to walk and she’ll no longer be happy standing up in her crib while her mom dozes off beside her.
On a quiet evening close to midnight, Ruiz pulls up a selfie of the two on her phone. Her daughter is all smiles, sporting pink-rimmed plastic sunglasses. Ruiz points to herself next to her in the photo — the bags under her eyes and her exhausted expression. The photo was taken at 2:44 p.m.
Ruiz is tired. But she has no plans to leave the overnight shift. She ‘s saving up to buy a car.
She relies on Uber to get to and from work. Her monthly transportation costs: $450. That’s half of the $900 she pays for an efficiency in Hialeah.
For now, staying home is not an option — and neither is paying for childcare.
This series was supported by a grant from the Solutions Journalism Network.