I have always wanted to be a mom. Despite the deeply emotional and primal desire, I never thought too hard about the logistics of motherhood, like maternity leave and child care; I just assumed everything would work itself out. My own mother always told me, “There’s never a good time to have a kid,” and I took that to heart. I knew my husband and I would never have enough money, enough time, enough room in our house—but I also knew so many people do it with less than we had and that we would be OK.
And it’s true; we are. At night, while we watch through the baby monitor as our child sleeps, I say to my husband, “We are the luckiest people in the world.” We own our home, we have two good union jobs, and we found a child care situation that only (only!) costs $175 per week, $700 a month, $9,100 per year, (although we just got notice the cost will increase starting in September by 33 percent). We are making it work. Many parents in the United States can’t say the same.
There are countless educational resources to support a healthy pregnancy, including on how to breastfeed, choosing between cloth and disposable diapers, sleep training, and engaging your child without screens. But finding child care is a maze of waiting lists, deposits, staffing ratios, and mortgage-like payments. It is an expensive headache for everyone, regardless of location and income.
In Facebook parent groups in Philadelphia, where I live, there is a constant stream of posts from pregnant women or new mothers: When should I get on day care waitlists? How much does it cost? Should I hire a nanny? How much does it cost? Should I do a nanny share? How much does it cost?
The comments, meant to help, often add to the confusion and panic: You should have gotten on waiting lists the moment you got a positive pregnancy test, and the waiting lists aren’t a guarantee, and you have to keep following up with the day care to remind them that you’re still interested, and if you want to save your spot you’ll have to put down a deposit, and my day care is great but they don’t have spots open until summer 2025 at the earliest, but it’s still worth calling anyway. Good luck!
For as often as child care is discussed online and in real-life parent groups, accurate information is scarce. In Philadelphia, infant care for a single child has an average annual cost of $13,320—22.5 percent of the city’s median household income of $53,090. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) defines affordable child care as costing no more than 7 percent of a family’s household income. Nationally, the average cost of a nanny is $766 per week (for a fifty-two-week year, that’s nearly $40,000), day care is $321 per week (nearly $17,000 per year), and a family child care center costs $230 per week (nearly $12,000 per year).
According to Care.com, an online marketplace for families and caregivers to find each other, 35 percent of families are using their savings in addition to their income to shoulder the cost of care. A huge part of the issue is that wages are too low, or at the very least, not keeping up with the rising cost of child care. We all deserve to be paid well for our work, including child care workers, who do the work that “makes all other work possible.” (If my son doesn’t go to day care, for whatever reason—they’re closed, or he’s sick—I can only get work done while he’s napping.) Child care workers are some of the lowest-paid workers in our society.
In Pennsylvania, the estimated hourly pay for early childhood educators is less than $13 per hour. The national mean is not much higher, at $15.42 an hour. Parents pay huge chunks of their income for day care, but the people doing the care barely make ends meet. Child care center owners have to pay for rent and other business needs, along with employment and staffing, making it difficult to pay teachers their worth. Child care may be one of the most important jobs in the world, but it’s not profitable, and there are very few ways to cut costs.
“Unlike a lot of other fields, you can’t really—and I don’t think we want to—automate it,” says Rachel Cohen, a senior policy reporter at Vox who often covers the child care crisis. “There are not many technological things that could make the cost of having a small number of kids [cheaper]. CVS can eliminate jobs by doing self-checkout; there’s nothing like that in child care. The cost of labor doesn’t go down, and if you want to pay workers well and increasingly well to compete with other jobs, the math doesn’t work.”
I put out a call on social media for child care stories and was flooded with messages about how difficult it is to find care, and to pay for it. Most of those who responded asked me to use their first names only.
Michael, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, sends his eleven-month-old son to an in-home day care with twelve children. He and his wife love it, but it costs $550 per week, which “feels crazy to us,” he says. “This expense makes it more challenging to make ends meet for us and is definitely a big consideration in deciding whether we have a second child. We’ve been told by some other parents that this price is ‘actually a good deal.’ ”
Jillian, a mother of two in suburban Virginia, spends $3,700 per month (nearly $45,000 per year), which she says is almost double her mortgage. There are other contributing factors to why she and her husband are not having any more children, but the cost of day care is certainly one of them. Marianne, in the suburbs of Portland, Maine, pays $323 per week (nearly $17,000 per year), with help from her parents. She told me that even with the financial support, “the burden is pretty significant. We don’t really have disposable income at all. The possibility of my car dying or some kind of emergency expense coming up with our house are constant background anxieties.”
Nathaniel, in Portland, Oregon, pays about $3,000 per month for two children—nearly a third of his household’s total take-home pay. Lilian, in Philadelphia, is in a similar situation. Her family pays $1,930 per month for day care, which is about 35 percent of her take-home pay. She told me that she only contributes 3 percent of her salary to retirement because of the strain of child care, which costs almost two and a half times their mortgage. A second child would mean “spending almost all my take-home pay on child care, effectively reducing us to a single household income.”
There are more obstacles to finding child care than cost. While staff-to-child ratios vary by state, in Pennsylvania, the ratio for infants is 4:1, meaning one teacher can care for a maximum of four babies on her own. (As the parent of one child, I believe anyone who cares for four babies at a time deserves a six-figure salary.) This obviously makes it difficult to find available day care—there are just fewer spots to go around for babies, and it costs more.
Allyson, a public school teacher in the Philadelphia area, is due with her first child at the end of September. She tells me that child care “has been on my mind basically every moment of the past couple months.” She has been searching for a spot in day care with a January 2025 start, but most have waitlists until next summer, are out of her price range, or both. Her employer offers no paid parental leave, so she planned to use the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) for twelve weeks before returning to work. But because of her inability to find affordable child care, she is currently planning to take the entire year off work. (Her school will hold her job until September 2025.) She tells me that “it genuinely seems like finding a part-time job in food service or tutoring to supplement our income will be easier than finding an affordable day care option for an infant. I’m hoping the process will be easier with more time and a one-year-old.”
The ability to find a spot for an infant is deeply connected to the fact that there is no federally guaranteed paid parental leave in this country. Currently, only four states—California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and New York—have temporary disability insurance (TDI) laws that also include paid parental leave. Even if an employer holds a person’s job, as Allyson’s is willing to do, the vast majority of people can’t afford to be without an income for even a short period of time.
In total, thanks to my union, I was able to take twenty-four weeks of leave from my job in the labor movement to bond with my baby. (But union membership isn’t a guarantee of robust paid leave either—my husband, a union electrician, only got two weeks after our son was born.) This is a huge privilege in the United States, one I’m honestly sheepish to even mention because many other parents get literally nothing.
Anne, a single mother by choice, tells me that she’s “written to all my local and state representatives in support of passing legislation to better cover early child care costs. I find it infuriating that the FMLA leave is only twelve weeks, not even mandated to be paid. Pitiful that I am viewed as having a ‘great’ maternity leave because I’m taking eighteen weeks, four of which are going to be unpaid. I read in the more international [Facebook] groups about Canadians and people in Europe getting a year or eighteen months, and it breaks my heart.”
Our child care system should be financially accessible to the average American, while also paying educators as though their work is exceptionally important.
The six months I had to be with my son full-time were the best six months of my life. This time allowed me to learn how to breastfeed—not an easy thing, no matter how “natural” it is—which required multiple home visits from a lactation consultant and a procedure on my baby’s tongue. I fed him on his schedule, which required me to be with him basically twenty-four hours per day—which would not have been possible without an abundance of paid leave. Less than a quarter of babies in the United States are exclusively breastfed by the six-month mark, and 60 percent of mothers stop breastfeeding before they planned to.
Being a full-time mom is hard, of course, and I was more tired than I had ever been in my life, but I was more fulfilled than I had ever been, too. I respect that many other mothers are desperate to get back to paid work outside the home, but that’s never how I felt. I could have watched him learn to crawl forever.
When it was time to go back to work, I felt sick about it. I couldn’t fathom the idea of being separated from my son. And neither my husband nor I had to go far. I work from home, and we decided we’d cobble together care until he turned a year old because we too could not find an affordable day care that had space for an infant. I went back to work for thirty-two hours a week—taking Fridays off, which I spent with my son—and my mom and her partner drove two hours up and back each week to watch him for two days. For my other two working days, we latched onto a nanny share in our neighborhood, paying $20 per hour.
Luckily, we knew this plan was only temporary. Our row home is attached to an in-home child care center—a day care run out of someone’s home. It starts taking children once they’re a year old, and the four rotating teachers together watch a total of twelve children from one to four years old. It’s not a fancy day care—the children aren’t separated by age, there’s no app for sharing photos or videos, there’s no key fob to get in, they eat processed foods and watch television on Fridays—but I can literally hear my son laugh (and cry) through my living room wall, it costs $175 per week, and, most importantly, he runs up the steps smiling to see his friends and his teachers every morning, without so much as a glance back in my direction.
Today, there is constant hand-wringing from politicians and pundits about the declining birth rate in this country, how people are waiting longer to have children, and how they’re having fewer of them. But who can blame them? Any society that purports to love children would see our multifaceted child care crisis for what it is: an existential threat to children, the parents who raise them, and the people who would one day hope to become parents.
Child care shouldn’t be a labyrinth parents have to blindly navigate on their own or a financial burden so large that it stops them from having a second kid. It should be treated as what it is: a critical social service for the nine in ten U.S. adults who have children or would like to. Our child care system should be financially accessible to the average American, while also paying educators as though their work is exceptionally important—because it is—even though it’s not a lucrative business.
To do this, the federal government must intervene to subsidize care. There is no other way to raise wages for workers without increasing costs for parents. And to decrease costs for parents without any government support would mean lowering already-dismal pay for child care workers, which is not a possibility either. This is how it works in many other countries. Norway spends nearly $30,000 of public dollars per child on early childhood care; Iceland spends $24,000; Finland and Denmark spend $23,000. The only sane thing to do, the only rational choice—for the good of children, parents, and educators alike—is for our government to subsidize care.