When the author and her husband, Zach, were living in Charlotte, North Carolina, they thought they had done everything right before starting a family. She worked in nonprofit development, he worked for a homebuilder, and they had bought their first home in a neighborhood they loved, one that felt built for children and the life they wanted.
Then they looked at childcare. Infant care was about $2,000 a month, close to half of her take-home pay at the time, and finding a facility with availability near their home was hard. Five months into her pregnancy, Zach got a job opportunity that moved the family back to California, to the Central Valley, about a two-hour drive from the Bay Area. The move came with a pay bump, and the family also had support in the Bay Area, including her parents. She quit her job when they crossed the country.
That personal calculation now mirrors a larger squeeze. Childcare costs once took around 7% of parental income per child in the 1980s, but they have climbed to 10% for couples and 30% for single parents. For this family, the numbers kept forcing the same choice. Five months after their first son was born, the pandemic hit and she was home with him. After the first year, she started thinking about going back to work part-time. Instead, when the couple tried for a second child, she stayed home. Once their second child arrived, full-time care for two children who were not yet school age would have cost more than $4,000 a month.
They budgeted for their 3-year-old to attend preschool part-time, at a cost of a little over $1,100, but that did not solve the broader problem. When the youngest was around 2, she began looking for remote work and applied for job after job. The interviews led nowhere. The gap between wanting to work and being able to afford care is exactly what makes childcare such a blunt force in family life now: a cost that can turn a second income into little more than a daycare payment. For families like hers, the answer is already clear — the work is there, but the care is not affordable enough to make it possible.
