You have to swaddle them, you have to hold them all the time. When they're newborns, they nap four times a day, they eat every two hours. Babies need constant supervision and attention. And the sticking point, like the thing that makes it so expensive, is most states, it varies a little bit, but they require one caregiver for every three to four infants, which is children 2 and under. There's fire safety codes, CPR requirements, square footage requirements so that you don't just pack 50 babies into a room and leave them lying on the floor or something like that.
There's no one that I have talked to who is arguing to deregulate the industry, because these laws have been put in place over the years to keep babies safe. On why child care is so expensive from the provider's point of view We have police, we have libraries, we have public schools, but child care has never been thought of in that way, even though I think, very obviously, it should have been a long time ago. If your house catches on fire, we don't ask, "Well, can you afford to put it out?" It's better for us collectively if we put the fire out, we collectively pay for a fire department, we put the fire out so that it doesn't spread to another person's home because they happen to live next to someone who can't afford the fire department. We recognize that we want everyone, regardless of income, to have access to a fire department. And there's no way to fix that in a private market setting.Īnd we have other examples of this in our society. When you talk to economists, they say this is a perfect example of what they call a "classic market failure," which is when the price point for a good or a service - in this particular instance it's child care - is too expensive for the consumers, by which I mean families, and too expensive or unaffordable for the providers, the people providing that service, in case, child care owners and workers. When you talk to economists, they say this is a perfect example of what they call a 'classic market failure.' She notes that despite the high cost of care, the average child care worker earns about $24,000 per year - less than many janitors and baristas. Suddath estimates that 95 percent of child care owners and workers are women, and 40 percent of them are women of color. In her recent article for Bloomberg Businessweek, Suddath examines why child care is so unaffordable in the U.S., and why attempts to provide federal funding for care keep failing in Congress.
dropped out of the workforce or switched to part-time solely because they couldn't afford child care," she says.
"I have written a lot of stories over the years and interviewed women about their career decisions, and I can't tell you the number of women that I have talked to who have. Though considered cheap by Brooklyn standards, it's still an enormous expense - and one that Suddath acknowledges is out of reach for many parents. child care industry is in need of an overhaul.Ĭlaire Suddath, a journalist in Brooklyn, pays about $24,000 a year for daycare for her 17-month-old daughter.
A preschooler reaches into her cubby at a preschool center in Mountlake Terrace, Wash.
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