The Cost of Childcare Is About to Explode

Childcare costs are reaching the point where it costs more for a parent to work than to stay home and raise their kids. And with how society is built, childrearing is again going to fall on the mothers.

Here is the dilemma: Our middle-class lifestyle requires two adult incomes. Two adult incomes mean paying for childcare. OR deferring children. OR never having children. To make matters worse, we are collectively having too few children to sustain the whole economic system we are working so hard to maintain. I don't know what the solution is, but the demographic challenge is real. China is finding out. And we will not be immune either.

The Cost of Childcare Is About to Explode | The New Republic

The Cost of Childcare Is About to Explode
If Congress allows billions in childcare relief to expire in three weeks, parents are going to pay the price.

With school underway, inflation cooling, and a strong economy, parents who have survived years of disruption can breathe a little easier. Not so fast. Millions of families are now facing a so-called childcare cliff that’s just weeks away.

On September 30, barring the intervention of Congress, $24 billion worth of pandemic relief funding for childcare will expire. This funding, part of President Biden’s American Rescue Plan of 2021, has been used to provide stabilization grants to childcare providers reeling first from enrollment drops and now from staffing shortages. With the relief money drying up, programs have only bad options.

Much of the media attention and commentary by elected officials has focused on the prospect of childcare programs closing, a notion fueled by a Century Foundation report stating that 70,000 programs “will likely close … and approximately 3.2 million children could lose their child care spots.” However, the more likely result—at least in the short term—is that the cost for parents will skyrocket.

 

Subsidized by rich people like me.