Almost 20 years ago, Danielle Atkinson was invited to interview for a job on a national political campaign. It was a dream role, and although it would mean leaving Michigan, Atkinson felt the opportunity was worth it.
Then, she learned she was pregnant. It was a surprise – she and her husband had planned to focus on their careers before starting their family – but one that was welcome and exciting. But once she learned how expensive it would be to enroll her baby in full-time care, Atkinson made a difficult decision. “I was like: ‘Oh, my God, I’ve got to be near a support system,’” she said, recalling her decision to decline the interview and remain in Michigan, where her extended family could help with care. “I had to take a step back from my career to have the baby.”
This is an all-too-common experience for US parents, particularly mothers. Unable to find childcare options that are affordable, are nearby and that work with the demands of their jobs, many parents are putting their financial wellbeing and mental health on the line. To make it work, they’re taking out lines of credit, working second jobs or commuting hours out of the way to bring their kids to daycare. Others are forgoing careers entirely.
It doesn’t need to be this way, Atkinson says. Looking back, she wonders how her life would be different had childcare been more accessible when her children were young. She may have pursued the out-of-state work opportunity, propelling her career in a different direction. Additionally, she and her husband might have invested the $200,000 they estimate having spent on care over the years, paid off their mortgage or saved up to cover their children’s college tuition.
“Imagine if I had been able to save that,” she said. “There’s so much we could have done for our own financial stability.”
Atkinson’s experience is a common one throughout the US, raising the questions: how did childcare become so bad – and what could the US be like if the problem were actually fixed?
Most parents and experts agree: the US’s childcare system is broken.
In the US, nearly 10 million children are enrolled in childcare, a service that offers education and developmental benefits to young children from birth to five years old and enables parents to work, go to school or pursue other endeavors. But in the absence of any coordinated public childcare system (as there is for K-12 education nationwide), parents are forced to contend with a patchwork of private offerings, including childcare centers and home-based care options.
To access that care, families pay a national average of nearly $1,000 every month per child, with families in high cost-of-living areas paying much more. In Idaho, for instance, families pay just over $750 per month for infant care, but in California, infant care averages $2,000 per month.
This exacerbates the financial strain families already experience with rising housing costs and grocery store prices. As a result, few families can manage with only one income – and more two-working-parent families means greater need for childcare.
For most Americans, childcare will be one of the largest recurring expenses they face. In many states, it’s outpacing both housing and college tuition. In Massachusetts, for instance, infant care costs an average of $26,709 per year. That’s 21% more than the average rent, and 83% more than in-state tuition at a public college.
Many parents are unprepared for those financial realities. “The cost was a surprise,” said Atkinson, recounting her shock when she learned the price of daycare while pregnant with her first child. “Me and my partner made well above the mean for Michigan. So I was like, if this is a problem for us with one baby and two incomes, how are people doing it?”
Despite sky-high costs for parents, childcare workers themselves are severely underpaid, with most earning poverty-level wages at around $14 per hour. That’s because the thousands of dollars that families pay into the system each year don’t cover the true costs of labor, rent, utilities and grocery bills. Struggling to keep doors open, facilities keep salaries low.
“Providers themselves are not getting rich working a daycare job,” said Wendy Robeson, senior research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women. “They may have another job on the weekend. They cannot make enough money to stay in the field they love.”
For Verna Esposito, who directs a childcare center in Greenwich, Connecticut, labor represents 60% of her costs. And even though she pays at the top end of what most centers offer, “You literally can’t live on your own on a teacher’s salary here,” she said.
As a result, the industry sees massive turnover. Childcare workers quit in favor of better-paying, lower-stress jobs. Facilities close because they can’t afford to offer higher wages in addition to covering soaring rent, utilities and grocery bills. And parents face fewer and fewer options for care.
“On a national level, the whole system is fragile,” said Amie Latterman, chief advancement officer at Children’s Council San Francisco, a non-profit that advances childcare and early education access.
This precariousness forces families to make tradeoffs. Most parents sacrifice either affordability, accessibility or quality, Robeson explained. Families may go with a lower-quality option because there’s an opening, or even take on debt to pay for care.
Rebecca Bailin, co-founder and executive director of New Yorkers United for Child Care, said she had spoken with parents who had opted not to pay medical bills or taken loans out of their retirement plans to cover the costs. “They aren’t saving for retirement or college,” she said. “There’s all these really tough things people are choosing.”
Others may travel 30 minutes or more out of their way to reach a childcare center that is affordable and that doesn’t have a lengthy waitlist. More than half of American children live in areas sometimes referred to as childcare deserts, which have more children than licensed childcare slots, research shows.
Parents are left drained by a system that should, in theory, be offering support.
“There’s just a huge mental load and burden that parents have to take on to navigate the system, because it wasn’t designed to meet their needs,” said Stephanie Schmit, director of the childcare team at the Center for Law and Social Policy (Clasp).
That burden disproportionally affects populations that are already marginalized, like women of color and non-English-speaking groups. “The system’s complexity makes it especially challenging for immigrant parents to understand and navigate,” said Patricia Lozano, executive director of advocacy group Early Edge California. “Many struggle to even determine how to apply.”
For low-wage workers, the math just doesn’t add up. In New York, for instance, it would take 28 weeks of full-time work to cover the annual costs of infant care for someone earning minimum wage. In Oregon, it would take that worker 32 weeks to earn enough to pay for care. In Tennessee, where minimum wage is just $7.25 per hour, it would take the better part of a year – and longer than most pregnancies – at 42 weeks.
Many of the US’s national peers have figured out solutions to this problem. In Denmark, parents pay at most 25% of childcare center tuition. Canada has plans to lower the costs of childcare to $10 a day by 2026. France offers tax credits to parents of babies and toddlers that cover up to 85% of what the family pays for center- or home-based care. Germany has a sliding-scale system that charges parents based on their income.
Instead of parents paying huge childcare fees, in other wealthy nations, it’s the government that picks up the tab, spending on average $14,000 per child per year on early childhood education. Compared to those nations, the US – which contributes just $500 per child annually in grants and programs serving low-income families – is woefully behind.
There have been moments when it seemed the US might take a different tack, however.
During the second world war, the federal government provided childcare in navy yards for mothers working on the home front. The care was of such a high caliber, it drew women by the hundreds of thousands. Plus, mothers were given access to take-home dinners, free medical services and other resources to help balance their domestic and workforce duties. “It was a state of emergency, and the country met the need,” Robeson said.
In 1971, Congress passed the bipartisan Comprehensive Child Development act – a bill that promised to create a multibillion-dollar childcare system to alleviate the burdens on working parents – only to see it vetoed by Richard Nixon, who claimed the policy veered too close to communism.
“That moment in the 70s seems to have been a real inflection point,” said early childhood education policy expert Elliot Haspel. “It would have been a stake in the ground [confirming] that childcare is really a public concern.”
While the topic regained traction when the Child Care and Development Block Grant was authorized in 1990, subsidizing care for lower-income families, that program is severely underfunded, with only 14% of eligible families receiving assistance.
Then, after the widespread childcare closures during the Covid-19 pandemic, universal childcare became a central facet of Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act. “It brought to the forefront the idea that childcare is the backbone of our economy. If we don’t have childcare, people cannot work,” said Robeson.
But after the funds allocated to free preschool and daycare subsidies were slashed during negotiations, the initiative was all but dropped.
Experts say lawmakers’ inability to solve the childcare crisis is rooted in a collective lack of value placed on caregiving, a profession that has historically been occupied by underpaid women and people of color. “The system was built on the backs of women of color in the US,” said Latterman of Children’s Council, going on to explain that in California, 69% of early educators are of people color and 51% have a primary language other than English.
According to Haspel, the system also wrongly treats childcare like a market good, akin to a gym membership or a meal at a restaurant, instead of a social good, like a fire department or public school. “The economic model doesn’t work for anyone involved because we’ve miscast the service as a purely individual commodity,” he said.
Insufficient paid family leave policies, which pressure new parents to find childcare solutions swiftly, only make things worse. “You get people rushing to get their six-week-olds into school,” said Atkinson. “When you eliminate that burden, you’ve got more people staying home with flexible schedules and less people burdening the system.”
The most impactful solution would be a universal system that provides easy options for childcare to all parents in their neighborhoods that are either free of charge or highly subsidized, experts and advocates say. That system would be well-resourced, with an abundance of choices so that families can pick the childcare solution that is right for them, whether it be at a center, in a home or with a family member. Educators would be well-paid; culturally accessible options would exist for families who don’t speak English as a first language; and parents and community members would be able to participate in a school board-like accountability process.
Estimates put the cost of nationwide childcare at around $140bn annually, which Haspel admits is a big number, but one that is in line with what is spent on other major social programs, like K-12 education, which costs roughly $800bn per year.
In the absence of dedicated federal funding, some states are financing their own solutions at smaller scales.
During the pandemic, Massachusetts introduced grants to help childcare centers stay afloat. Washington DC raised wages for childcare workers, while Texas lawmakers introduced a bill that would give tax breaks to childcare centers. Michigan’s Tri-Share program splits the cost of care among families, employers and the state (although the program’s opt-in model means few employers have taken it on).
While a growing number of states, including California, Florida, New York and West Virginia, offer some form of universal pre-K, New Mexico is the only state to offer most families free childcare from birth: in 2022, the state enshrined the right to education for children ages 0-5 in the state constitution and guaranteed $150m in state dollars per year to support the system.
While these advancements are sources of hope for advocates and families, they still form a patchwork, leaving parents in most of the country without support. At the same time, a national solution remains elusive – largely because lawmakers can’t agree on the nuts and bolts of a centralized childcare system. “We haven’t landed on the perfect [model] that all of Congress will agree to,” said Schmit, of Clasp.
But advocates say that voter support for some sort of publicly backed system is there – and growing. Within months of starting New Yorkers United for Child Care, co-founder Bailin saw hundreds of people at rallies organized by the group and collected thousands of signatures petitioning against proposed cuts to the city’s universal pre-K program. “It really does cut across demographics and party lines,” she said. “I’ve never worked on an issue that has resonated so much.”
Atkinson, now a mother of six, is part of a growing movement that’s pushing to rebuild – and reimagine – the US’s childcare system. She founded Mothering Justice, an organization focused on mothers of color that advocates for policies like universal childcare. The group seeks to reframe childcare as a vital public good – one that treats caregivers as educators, and pays them accordingly – with a range of high-quality childcare options, setting children and families up for developmental success, and enabling parents and guardians nationwide to access it easily and automatically, so they can focus their energy and resources on the betterment of themselves, their families and society at large.
The fruits of a universal childcare system would be widely felt, Atkinson and other experts say.
With more cash on hand, parents would have more economic security – and with that, more stability, better mental health and more time to spend together. Adults, especially women and mothers, wouldn’t have to choose between caring for their children and career advancement.
These developments would be a boon for the country’s economy writ large. Between giving families – and childcare educators themselves – more money to spend, and keeping parents in the workforce, consumer sales and productivity might tick up. “Childcare is the job that makes the world go round. It’s the work that makes all other work possible,” said Schmit.
Plus, without the financial and professional stressors caused by inaccessible childcare, families may have more children. “I have talked to far too many individuals who have said: ‘I would have another kid if it wasn’t for how expensive childcare is,’” Haspel said.
Families face many other challenges in raising their children, like access to healthcare, the soaring cost of higher education, and racial, economic and social inequalities. But solving the childcare problem is key to bettering the lives of everyone. “Moms and dads would be doing what they want, whether that’s going back to school, working, buying a house or getting a new car. The economy would be humming,” Robeson said.
“I hope it happens in my lifetime.”
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This is the first piece in Unequal Beginnings, a new Guardian US series about how disparities undermine child well-being in America.
