As American families have changed…
The New Push For Quality Child Care
by Leslie Bennetts
published: 07/19/2009
When Timisha Daniels had her first child a year ago, she quit her job as a medical assistant in Charlotte, N.C. “With my income, I would pretty much have been working just to pay for child care, so we decided I would stay home with our son,” says Daniels, a 25-year-old Air Force veteran. “I was very worried about the quality of child care. And I really thought it would be easy to jump back into working when I was ready.”
Since then, however, Daniels’ husband has been laid off, and her own job search proved unsuccessful for many months. “If I had known what was going to happen,” she says, “I would have stayed at my job. Now I’m much more open to child care.”
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For most families today, child care is a necessity. Two-thirds of all American women are working by the time their first child is a year old, compared with only 17% four decades ago. Single-parent households, most of them headed by women, constitute a quarter of all U.S. families. Fortunately, the evidence is growing that quality care can have far-reaching social and educational benefits for children. The problem many Americans have, however, is finding excellent care that is also affordable.
“Affordability has been a crisis issue for the last 25 years,” notes Donna Klein, president of Corporate Voices for Working Families, an organization that works with corporations to influence public policy on family issues. “But child care enables people to be employed, and the absence of quality care is one of the main drivers for people leaving the workforce.”
The cost—which has risen by as much as 11% in the last two years—varies widely, depending on such factors as location, type of care, and the age of the child. Nationwide, the cost ranges from $3380 to $10,787 for one preschooler, according to the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies. Full-time care for one infant at a center can be as much as $15,895 a year. A full-time babysitter may cost from $400 to $1000 a week, depending on where you live.
Those on the lower end of the economic ladder find it hardest to come up with good solutions. “For women who are not in managerial or professional jobs, the cost is a nightmare, and for low-income women it’s prohibitive,” says Ellen Bravo, coordinator of Family Values at Work, a consortium of state coalitions working on policies to support families.
In European nations, high-quality child care, especially for 3- to 6-year-olds, is seen as a right of citizenship. Governments view it as an investment in the nation’s future, and excellent facilities with top-notch care are plentiful. Read the rest of this entry »
