WHEN CHILD CARE IS JUST A DREAM
For many American families, real solutions are long overdue
CENTENNIAL, Colo. – The dilemma at dinner concerns a little less than $25 and how much it’s worth to this family of four.
Whitney and Tim Phinney couldn’t have imagined how much time they would spend scrutinizing amounts like these, weighing options that never seem ideal. But then they had children in America.
Tim, a stay-at-home dad in suburban Denver, is struggling. He would prefer to return to his career, but the family can’t afford full-time child care – and the long days with kids and away from work have taken a toll.
Tim tells his wife, Whitney, he wants to attend a mental health therapy group Wednesday. But Whitney, who works two jobs and goes to school, says she won’t get home in time. Whitney could cut her workday short, costing the family $15. Or Tim could take their two kids, Brennan, 4, and Sunny, 2, to the drop-in day care at a cost of $22.50.
Leaving work early isn’t ideal. Neither is losing
“We’re on this financial ledge . ... We’re going to get pushed off.”
Whitney Phinney
$7.50 on child care – an amount of money that has become maddeningly consequential.
“Having kids for us has been financially devastating,” Whitney said. “We’re on this financial ledge, where if something good doesn’t happen ... we’re going to get pushed off.”
The Phinneys’ struggle is typical of millions of American families trying to balance work and kids in a country that has long lacked affordable, quality child care and paid parental leave, despite polling that shows public support for both and research laying out the drawbacks of not having either.
With both parents working in increasing numbers of American families, an unprecedented number of women in Congress and support from a Republican president and his daughter, the nation appeared on the cusp of changing all that.
But so far, nothing.
Lots of debate, few solutions
Working parents feel the frustration every day.
It turns out not everyone shares their urgency.
Some businesses – and their lobbyists to Congress – don’t want to sign on to federal legislation that would provide relief for child care costs and require paid leave. Some companies do provide family-friendly perks to their employees. But major business lobbying groups have balked at laws that would require all employers to provide those kinds of benefits.
But it’s more than businesses and their lobbyists. Polling continues to show many Americans don’t see the need for the federal government to get involved in affordable child care – or, for that matter, for women to work.
Nearly half of all Americans still believe kids are best off if one parent stays home with them, preferably the mother. Many say they don’t want to pay for child care for other people’s kids. Some say federal policies for working parents instead would penalize parents who choose not to work.
Those attitudes contribute to inertia in Congress, insiders say. When Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and policy adviser, got to Washington to push for paid leave and affordable child care, she found that conservatives in Congress were nowhere near ready to sign on.
“I actually thought the first year (of the presidency) would be around debating the policy, which is where we are today,” Trump said. “The first year and a half was explaining what paid family leave was and why it made sense.”
Meetings and policy debates in Washington have indeed picked up.
Yet a solution remains out of reach: Federal proposals for what action to take and how to pay for it diverge wildly.
“I see this child care issue as part of the whole global ‘What’s wrong with Washington?’ ” said Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a front-runner for the 2020 Democratic nomination, who is pushing for universal child care as part of her candidacy. “It’s an issue that matters to families. It’s mattered for a long time now. And people are pushing harder and harder for change.”
Before having her own kids, Whitney Phinney acknowledges she thought of paid leave and subsidized child care as “handouts.”
Then, when Whitney had Brennan, she had no paid leave. Tim had one week of paid leave and one week of paid vacation he saved up for the birth. So Whitney was off, without a salary. And Tim had to keep working to pay the bills, so he wasn’t there to support her emotionally, or take time to care for himself.
Money was tight, and their mental health suffered.
“That was a really hard start, and I think if things could have been different in that time – if Tim could have stayed home for 12 weeks with no financial repercussions – I think our life now would be totally different,” Whitney said.
It’s ‘the little guys’ who suffer
Americans want paid leave for parents – overwhelmingly. About 80% say mothers should have paid maternity leave, and 69% say the same for fathers, according to the Pew Research Center.
And they don’t have it – overwhelmingly.
It’s not that all workplaces are against expanding paid leave. More employers are recognizing it’s good for business: It helps them hold on to highly trained workers.
But some businesses balk at the idea of federal paid leave. They don’t want to be told to pay for a certain policy themselves. Some don’t want to share the cost via paying a tax, either. And if they do offer paid leave, they want to decide who gets it and how much.
“Trust us to treat our employees well,” said Brad Close, who heads public policy and advocacy for the National Federation of Independent Businesses, whose member companies each have 100 or fewer workers. “Please don’t make a ‘one size fits all’ for every business out there. It’s not going to work for the little guys.”
Some big corporations support a federal policy. But often, “companies who do this are doing it … for their employees, and of course they use it as a recruiting tool,” said Marc Freedman, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s vice president for workplace policy.
In fact, a majority of Americans back this approach: They say paid leave, required by a federal mandate or not, should be paid for by employers, not the government, according to the Pew Research Center.
Many companies skeptical of a federal mandate understand offering paid leave is the right thing to do, said Rose Arriada-Keiper, vice president of global rewards for Adobe. The problem, she said, is how to keep a business running while key employees are out for months.
“I think a lot of companies struggle with having that forced on them,’’ she said.
Even at Adobe – where parents get 16 weeks of paid leave after a new child arrives, plus an additional 10 weeks for women who give birth, and where top leaders support a payroll tax for paid leave – the policy has been frustrating for some managers.
The independent businesses federation insists the U.S. doesn’t need a federal mandate – a 2016 survey found 73% of its members offered paid time off for reasons such as vacation or sickness to full-time employees. But just 18.3% of its surveyed businesses specifically offered paid maternity leave, and only 19% of working Americans have access to paid family leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Small businesses often don’t have the money or time to rehire and train, let alone pay for new parents to take time off – so some of them do support federal paid leave, even if it would mean a small payroll tax. For instance, the Main Street Alliance, which represents roughly 30,000 small businesses, supports the Family Act, the Democrats’ main legislation, which funds time off for qualifying life events through a payroll tax.
Hanging on to skilled employees
Thanks to a paid-leave tax in New Jersey, Tony Sandkamp says a valued employee was able to take time off from Sandkamp’s custom cabinetry business when his wife had twins. After drawing wages from the state fund, the worker eventually returned to the job.
“It helped me maintain … a skilled employee who is very difficult to replace,” Sandkamp said. Finding and training a new worker could cost about $30,000, he said, compared with the roughly $2 a paycheck he says goes toward paid leave.
After navigating that first maternity leave, the Phinneys have tried endless arrangements to keep a healthy home life, balancing financial needs with career goals, mental health with family time. Whitney has been a stay-at-home mom. Tim has been a stay-at-home dad. They have alternated working full-time. Tim tried working nights but couldn’t sustain it.
In 1975, more than half of mothers stayed home with their kids, but today both parents work in 70% of families with children. Child care costs on average $12,350 to $13,900 a year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The Phinneys are in the red every month. Whitney is working two jobs – full-time as a research assistant at a college and part-time as a tutor at a community college. Right now, Tim cares for the kids, but there’s still preschool for Brennan to pay for, plus a few hours a week of day care for Sunny, too.
“Preschool is important and prepares them for school, and I want what’s best for my kids,” Whitney said.
Struggling to find a balance
They supplement with savings, which Whitney says will run out soon.
If Tim, who has spent most of his career as a warehouse associate, went back to work, they’d have to send the kids to preschool full-time, and the fee would skyrocket from $490 a month to $2,400 a month. Finding a salary that makes that math work is no easy feat.
“It’s always been kind of like Goldilocks and the three bears. We’ve been trying to find the right balance, whether it was money, time together, sleep,” Tim said. The child care system in the U.S., he said, “doesn’t take into account what people’s likely work schedules would be. You wouldn’t be able to find night (care) as easily.”
For many Americans, that’s not a hypothetical. These are the parents driving delivery trucks before shops open and cleaning office buildings after hours, the overnight emergency workers and health aides with rotating shifts.
If you’re a parent working nights, and you find a place like Dee’s Tots, you clamor for a spot – and hope you can afford it.
Deloris and Patrick Hogan run the 24-hour day care out of their home in New Rochelle, New York.
The children, all under 10, eat dinner on two plastic tables in a room ringed with books, art supplies and toys. Then they join Deloris in vacuuming the floor that will soon hold rollaway beds.
Marisol Valencia, a single mother of two who juggles two jobs to support her family, said she would be unemployed without Dee’s.
“I would have to go on welfare,” said Valencia, 35, who works as a merchandise stocker for Nabisco during the week, a job that often requires working past 11 p.m. On Saturdays, she works at a supermarket.
Mixed attitudes on working moms
In 40% of households with children, moms are either the sole or primary source of income for the family, according to Pew. But many Americans say this isn’t ideal, a reflection of some people’s attitudes about where women with young kids ultimately belong.
Nearly half of Americans say in families with young kids, at least one parent should stay home, according to a 2018 report from Pew.
Those people identify overwhelmingly with one political party: Republicans, especially conservatives – who control half of Congress.
“I don’t think it’s the job of the government to control our child care,” said Terri Lustig of West Chester, Ohio. Lustig, now 62, was a stay-at-home mom while she raised her kids, homeschooling them. “If a parent wants their child in child care, then they should work and pay for it . ... I don’t want to be taxed anymore.”
Many young families who want to have a parent at home with kids fulltime also say they don’t want to be penalized for that choice.
“If you say we are going to provide money to the family, but only if they put the kids in day care, then you are encouraging one choice over another, and one that in a lot of cases is not the one the family wants to make,” said Oren Cass, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.
Which raises the question: Shouldn’t stay-at-home parents get money or perks, too?
If stay-at-home parents can’t share in programs for working families, “I think it devalues my wife and the work she does as a stay-at-home mom,” said Joe Malichio, 41, a Republican from Pound Ridge, New York.
Diane Malichio, 54, worked full-time in marketing while raising her two grown children, who are from a previous marriage. She has stayed home with the other two, now 13 and 15.
That decision has meant less disposable income and cutting back on nonessentials like vacations or phone upgrades. So why give perks to people who are bringing home extra income?
If everyone with children had an equal child care tax credit, Malichio said, “it could be put toward day care. Or if you’re a stay-at-home parent, it would go to the family, knowing that you don’t have another income.”
‘We need a federal policy’
For many Republicans and Democrats working on these issues, the inertia to expanding paid leave and affordable child care leads to one conclusion.
“We need a federal policy,” said Ivanka Trump, who has been working with the president to build a consensus despite opposition from some of the conservatives who elected him.
Although more large companies have been offering paid leave and affordable child care, “it’s not enough,” Trump said.
Warren – who has pushed for universal child care as part of her 2020 presidential campaign – would agree with some of Trump’s assertions. But, she says, large, powerful industrial interests are the biggest hurdle to getting anything passed.
“The problem is, in Washington, giant corporations and billionaires have a lot better lobbyists than babies who need child care,” she said.
Despite bipartisan interest in Washington, compromise remains elusive.
Most Democrats favor a payroll tax or a new entitlement to fund parental leave and child care programs. Many Republicans suggest letting people draw early from Social Security or changing laws around tax-exempt savings accounts.
Some signs of hope
A few moments of partnership in Congress have brightened hopes. Sens. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, and Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat, in July proposed letting new parents take a $5,000 Child Tax Credit in the first year of a birth or adoption and giving them a smaller benefit – $1,500 instead of the current $2,000 – for 10 years after that.
And after five years of largely leftwing support, the Family Act has signed a Republican co-sponsor, Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J.
Still, the looming presidential election hangs over Washington, making a timeline for progress uncertain.
New American children, meanwhile, are born every day.
As Washington debates, families like the Phinneys do the best they can to care for their kids. They’ll sit down for dinner and find themselves beset by discussions over a few dollars that are now frustratingly precious.
“I know I will be judged for having kids,” Whitney said. “But raising children is something our society should support.
“It shouldn’t be a choice people are suffering for.”
“If a parent wants their child in child care, then they should work and pay for it . ... I don’t want to be taxed anymore.”
Terri Lustig, 62 Former stay-at-home mom in West Chester, Ohio