Child care costs are forcing tough choices
The Salovin family pays $26,000 a year for child care for their two daughters.
For them, it’s a worthwhile expense, knowing their 1- and 4year-old girls are at a licensed facility and they can both stay in the workforce.
But even the Delaware County, Pa., couple — who work in health care administration and pharmaceuticals — is being stretched to the limit financially.
“It’s not the only reason we’re not having any more kids, ” said Amy Salovin, 36. “But it’s a factor in our decision to remain a family of four.”
When they started looking at centers in 2019, the Salovins were quoted prices of $300 to $600 a week.
“We were really stressed because we were also making student loan payments, which were for us very high,” she said. Since then, their job situations have changed, prompting them to earn more, and the three-year pandemic pause in student loan payments freed up more of their monthly income. Those factors have allowed them to pay for yearlong, five-days-a-week care.
“What would we have done otherwise?” Salovin said. “I don’t know.”
For years, the rising cost of child care has caused parents across the Philadelphia region and the country to make tough choices.
Between 2019 and 2023, child care costs jumped more than 30%, outpacing inflation, according to anonymized Bank of America data for 68 million customers nationwide. Families making between $100,000 and $250,000 a year saw the biggest increases.
Amid an ongoing staffing crisis, the child care landscape got even bleaker this fall when federal stimulus money — which an expert said had “kept the child care system from collapsing” during the pandemic — ran out.
As a result, more than 4,000 centers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey could eventually close, potentially affecting more than 250,000 children, according to the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, though other industry experts and analysts have contested the “worst-case scenario” prediction.
In the meantime, the Biden administration in February announced it was moving to make it more affordable for families who qualify for child care subsidies, requiring all states to cap maximum co-payments at no more than 7% of a family’s monthly income.
But families who make too much money to qualify — as well as eligible families who are increasingly not signing up for these programs — won’t see relief.
“People in the middle-class range, it’s hard to afford these things, but we don’t qualify for any kind of funding,” said Amy Bobb, a 37-year-old social worker and mother of four who lives in Drexel Hill, Pa.
‘More than a mortgage’
Earlier this month, state lawmakers, local officials, child care center directors, and parents convened in Delaware County to push for more support from Harrisburg as pandemic funding runs out.
“We’re finding that there are all these parents who are at this level where they still can’t afford child care even though they both have really good jobs,” Monica Taylor, chair of the Delaware County Commissioners, said in a recent interview. “They’re making these decisions — like, ‘I’m not going to work,’ or mom stays home or is only working parttime — because it costs more money to put their child into child care.”
It’s a topic that’s personal to Taylor, whose daughter, born in 2020, was on day-care waiting lists for more than a year. About a month after she got into a center, the facility had to close its infant room due to staffing issues.
Taylor said she was fortunate to have family and friends in the area who could watch her daughter. A few months later, her daughter became old enough to get into the center’s young toddler room, which had adequate staffing.
She feels for the parents across the county who tell her how much they are struggling.
“They’re really trying to figure it out,” she said. “Early childhood, the 0-to-2, 0-to-3 age, it’s more than a mortgage to send your child to day care.”
Working parents turn to kin
The search for child care can be overwhelming and complex, with high demand for few spots, and can be accompanied by intense sticker shock.
Infant care at a Philadelphia center costs on average more than 22% of the median family income. In the surrounding suburban counties, that number is around 13%. Across the region last year, parents typically paid $12,000 to $18,000 a year for center-based child care for one infant, according to federal data. Costs tend to decrease as children get older.
“I knew day care was expensive, but I guess I didn’t put into perspective how much it would be,” said Carmen Luong, 29, of South Philadelphia. “It’s a whole mortgage payment or rent basically.”
Luong, who works in behavioral health, looked at more than a dozen facilities for her now-4month-old and made a spreadsheet to track the weekly prices she was quoted. When her retired father heard how much day care cost, he offered to watch her son, a situation that has worked out well for the family.
For some, options that once were considered a luxury — such as a full-time nanny or live-in au pair — now seem affordable in comparison to the cost of day care. Others cobble together a patchwork of caregivers, including babysitters; go in on a “nanny share ” with other families; or opt for home-based child care, licensed or unlicensed, which can sometimes be less safe.
Day care “was pricing out very similar to the nanny we ended up going with,” said Rebecca Lane, 29, of Germantown, Pa., who had her first child in 2022.
They have since given their nanny a raise, but they still wouldn’t opt to put their daughter in day care. Lane said the flexibility that a nanny provides is key for her and her partner’s hybrid-work schedules.
Even if they had wanted to get their daughter into a child care facility two years ago, the timeline wouldn’t have worked out with Lane’s maternity leave.
“There was such a long wait list for all of them,” said Lane, who works in merchandising. “We would have had to have signed up on a wait list before I knew even that I was pregnant.”
Leaving the workforce
Some parents have been left with no choice but to leave the workforce as a result of rising child care costs.
The number of dual-income households decreased from 2020 to 2023, according to the Bank of America analysis. Oftentimes, women — who are more likely to be the lower earner in their relationship and to carry more of the emotional and parenting load — are the ones who make the professional sacrifice.
“I would love to be at work full time but I can’t afford it,” Megan Ross, a chemist and mother of two who lives in Newtown Square, said at the discussion earlier this month in Delaware County.
“Me and my husband are both college-educated. We don’t make enough money (to afford care on our own). We make too much money” to qualify for assistance, she added. “What are we supposed to do?”
Others, such as mom Amy Salovin, are hoping that they don’t have to make that choice between their job and child care.
“Taking the long view, it’s better to remain working, even though a significant portion of my salary goes toward child care right now,” Salovin said. The long-term earnings potential and the difficulty of reentering the workforce make her hesitant to leave her job, even temporarily.
For her, there are also intangible benefits.
“I’m a better parent when I have more patience and my own thing,” Salovin said. “I like my work.”