The Norwalk Hour

CHILD

- Moriah Balingit and Sharon Lurye reported for The Associated Press and Daniel Beekman reported for The Seattle Times.

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 stay-at-home mom as an affluent woman with a high-earning partner, said Jessica Calarco, a sociologis­t at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“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.

Her own research indicates three-quarters of stay-at-home moms live in households with incomes less than $50,000, and half have household incomes of less than $25,000.

Still, the high cost of child care has upended the careers of even those with college degrees.

When Jane Roberts gave birth in November, she and her husband, both teachers, quickly realized sending baby Dennis to day care was out of the question. It was too costly, and they worried about finding a quality provider in their hometown of Pocatello, Idaho.

The school district has no paid medical or parental leave, so Roberts exhausted her sick leave and personal days to stay home with Dennis. In March, she returned to work and husband Mike took leave. By the end of the school year, they’ll have missed out on a combined nine weeks of pay. To make ends meet, they’ve borrowed money against Jane’s life insurance policy.

In the fall, Roberts won’t return to teaching. The decision was wrenching.

For low- and middle-income women who do find child care, the expense can become overwhelmi­ng. The Department of Health and Human Services has defined “affordable” child care as an arrangemen­t that costs no more than 7% of a household budget. But a Labor Department study found fewer than 50 American counties where a family earning the median household income could obtain child care at an “affordable ” price.

There’s also a connection between the cost of child care and the number of mothers working: a 10% increase in the median price of child care was associated with a 1% drop in the maternal workforce, the Labor Department found.

In Birmingham, Alabama, single mother Adriane Burnett takes home about $2,800 a month as a customer service representa­tive for a manufactur­ing company. She spends more than a third of that on care for her 3-year-old.

In October, that child aged out

of a program that qualified the family of three for child care subsidies. So she took on more work, delivering food for DoorDash and Uber Eats. To make the deliveries possible, her 14-year-old has to babysit.

Even so, Burnett had to file for bankruptcy and forfeit her car because she was behind on payments. She is borrowing her father’s car to continue her delivery gigs. The financial stress and guilt over missing time with her kids have affected her health, Burnett said. She has had panic attacks and has fainted at work.

“My kids need me,” Burnett said, “but I also have to work.”

When Daizha Rioland was five months pregnant with her first child, she posted in a Facebook group for Dallas moms that she was looking for child care. Several warned she was already behind if she wasn’t on any wait lists. Rioland, who has a bachelor’s degree and works in communicat­ions for a nonprofit, wanted a racially diverse program with a strong curriculum.

While her daughter remained on wait lists, Rioland’s parents

stepped in to care for her. Finally, her daughter reached the top of a waiting list — at 18 months old. The tuition was so high she could only attend part-time. Rioland got her second daughter on waiting lists long before she was born, and she now attends a center Rioland trusts.

“I’ve grown up in Dallas. I see what happens when you’re not afforded the luxury of high-quality education,” said Rioland, who is Black. “For my daughters, that’s not going to be the case.”

Slemp still sometimes wonders how she ended up staying at home with her son . She thought she was doing well. Her state job seemed like a step toward financial stability.

“Our country is doing nothing to try to help fill that gap,” Slemp said. As a parent, “we’re supposed to keep the population going, and they’re not giving us a chance to provide for our kids to be able to do that.”

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