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I've been in the role of a single mother, dependent on child care. About six years ago, I had my son in day care from about six months to two years old. The last year we were there, he was sick one to two times a month.
I had to miss work to keep him home but couldn't afford to continue missing work because, obviously, you get charged for your time slot whether you use it or not. At one point, the director of the program told me, "This isn't your dumping ground." I was forced to bring him in because I had to work and had no family support or other options.
It got to a point where my daycare bills were so high I had to face the fact that, at this rate, I could not pay back what I owed in daycare fees. With government assistance, my monthly bill for full-time day care was $880. As a cook, my standard wages back then were $12-13 per hour.
My overdue bill at day care was about $2,000. After dating my current husband for a year, he said, "Why don't we take him out of daycare and work opposite shifts?" So we have been doing that.
It took me until tax time the following year before I could pay my daycare fees. Now that we have elevated our careers, we do not qualify for benefits, which makes us even less likely to use daycare options.
We, as people, cannot thrive with a housing crisis, tariffs and high food costs, with daycare fees taking half the wages of people in entry-level positions when the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. This plays into why birth rates are down. After discovering the cost of child care, many families stop at one child.
According to a CBS News article, child care can cost more than housing or college tuition and the overall cost of child care has soared more than 50% in the last decade. A quote from author Elliot Haspel: "Having a young child in this country is a cause of poverty. It's not correlated with it; it's the cause of poverty."
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