Rising child care costs are ‘terrifying’
Once a month, after the kids are in bed, Margie Yeager and her husband convene at the dining room table. She opens her computer and pulls up the spreadsheet where she tracks the family budget. There is one column that’s caused far more stress this year than any other: child care.
Ms. Yeager and her husband have three kids — ages 3, 6 and 7 — and child care has always been expensive.
But with schools and many day cares closed during the pandemic, the cost has skyrocketed: from $1,850 per month before the coronavirus hit to $5,300 in December. She used to pay nothing for her two oldest children, both enrolled in public school where she lives in Washington, D.C. Now they’re part of a learning “pod” led by a woman who used to work in their school cafeteria.
They had to dip into their savings to cover the cost.
“I feel actively stressed when we write the check every month,” said Ms. Yeager, who works at an education nonprofit. Like many other parents, she has considered scaling back at her job or taking a year off. “I don’t feel like there’s a good alternative.”
Nine months into the pandemic, many children haven’t returned to the schools or day-care centers they attended before the coronavirus, kept out of classrooms and nursery rooms by prolonged closures or parents who don’t yet feel comfortable sending them back.
Parents have been left to devise their own solutions. Some have formed pods or hired nannies, while others have enrolled their kids in private school, more likely to be open for in-person learning. These options are inevitably more expensive than pre-coronavirus child care — which, in the United States, was already astronomical.
While wealthier parents can afford to “get creative,” lower income and many single parents have far fewer options, said Caitlyn Collins, a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis who studies women and families. Some are leaning on family members or just doing the best they can on their own. Others have been laid off, or have had to quit their jobs to take care of their children.
Child-care costs are either increasing or they are “drastically shrinking,” Ms. Collins said; there’s not a whole lot of in between.
It hasn’t been easy for Ms. Yeager and her husband to assume the extra child-care costs — but they can make it work if they scrimp on everything else, at least for a little while. They resisted the extra costs for months, keeping all three kids at home as they worked remotely.
To get work done, she would get up at 5 a.m. Her husband would stay up as late as 2 a.m. It was a “really dark time,” she said, and there were days when “every single person in the family cried.” The extra child care cost, she says, is necessary for her family’s mental health — especially because no one knows when things will go back to normal.
When D.C. Public Schools announced it would start the school year fully virtual, Ms. Yeager said, she knew they had to do something.
“Where are they going to go?” she remembers asking her husband. “And how on earth are we going to afford it?”
The United States has been an outlier on child care long before the coronavirus, Ms. Collins said, with price tags far exceeding those in other high-income countries. The average cost of child care for a child under 4 is $9,589 per year, according to New America’s Care Report — more than the average cost of in-state college tuition.
It’s much more expensive in big cities: In Washington, D.C., the average cost of care for an infant is more than $24,000.
Rising child care costs are particularly “terrifying” for U.S. families, Ms. Collins said, because child care already accounts for an enormous part of their budget, often second only to a family’s rent or mortgage.
It’s different in other industrialized countries, she said, where child care is heavily subsidized. In Sweden, for example, child-care costs account for no more than 3% of a family’s income, and are capped at $1,800 per child, per year.
The U.S. government has provided little relief for parents struggling to pay for child care during the coronavirus. Families or individuals that qualified for the CARES Act, passed in the spring, were allotted $500 per child.
“That paid for six days of care for my infant,” said Casey Stockstill, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Denver.
Some parents who can afford it have swapped public schools for private schools or day care centers. When two spots opened at a popular downtown day care over the summer, Ms. Stockstill immediately enrolled her two kids, ages 4 and 18 months. Before the pandemic, her oldest had been attending a lower-cost kindergarten attached to a public elementary school. It closed in March, opened for six weeks in the fall, and closed again in November.
The new day care “takes every cent” of the budget, Ms. Stockstill says — and still doesn’t provide the stability she needs as a pre-tenure professor under pressure to research and write: her two sons are currently home for 14 days after a kid in her younger son’s class tested positive for the coronavirus.
“We’re white-knuckling it through,” said Ms. Stockstill, whose husband also works full time. It’s excruciating to have her sons at home for weeks, she says, while still paying full price for a day care she can barely afford.
Other families have opted to pay for care in smaller groups, decreasing the chance that their children will be exposed to the coronavirus. “Money buys isolation,” Ms. Collins said.