Child care crisis is holding back moms without degrees
AUBURN, WASH. >> After a series of lower-paying jobs, Nicole Slemp finally landed one she loved. She was a secretary for Washington's child services department, a job that came with her own cubicle, and she had a knack for working with families in difficult situations.
Slemp expected to return to work after having her son in August. But then she and her husband started looking for child care — and doing the math. The best option would cost about $2,000 a month, with a long wait list, and even the least expensive option would cost around $1,600, still eating up most of Slemp's salary. Her husband earns about $35 an hour at a hose distribution company. Between them, they earned too much to qualify for government help.
“I really didn't want to quit my job,” says Slemp, 33, who lives in a Seattle suburb. But, she says, she felt like she had no choice.
The dilemma is common in the United States, where high-quality child care programs are prohibitively expensive, government assistance is limited, and daycare openings are sometimes hard to find at all. In 2022, more than 1 in 10 young children had a parent who had to quit, turn down or drastically change a job in the previous year because of child care problems. And that burden falls most on mothers, who shoulder more childrearing responsibilities and are far more likely to leave a job to care for kids.
Even so, women's participation in the workforce has recovered from the pandemic, reaching historic highs in December 2023. But that masks a lingering crisis among women like Slemp who lack a college degree: The gap in employment rates between mothers who have a four-year degree and those who don't has only grown.
For mothers without college degrees, a day without work is often a day without pay. They are less likely to have paid leave. And when they face an interruption in child care arrangements, an adult in the family is far more likely to take unpaid time off or to be forced to leave a job altogether, according to an analysis of Census survey data by The Associated Press in partnership with the Education Reporting Collaborative.
In interviews, mothers across the country shared how the seemingly endless
search for child care, and its expense, left them feeling defeated. It pushed them off career tracks, robbed them of a sense of purpose, and put them in financial distress.
Women like Slemp challenge the image of the stayat-home mom as an affluent woman with a high-earning partner, said Jessica
Calarco, a sociologist at the University of WisconsinMadison.
“The stay-at-home moms in this country are disproportionately mothers who've been pushed out of the workforce because they don't make enough to make it work financially to pay for child care,” Calarco said.