Rising Child Care Costs Put Bite on Middle Class

Debra Harris, a single mother, quit her $34,000-a-year job as an occupational therapist for the summer because she can’t afford full-time care for her two children.

Kathy Popino, a receptionist, and her electrician husband have gone into debt to keep their toddler and 8-year-old in child care at the YMCA, after a bad experience with a lower-priced home caregiver.

Mary O’Mara, a computer network administrator, and her husband, a factory worker, have junked the conventional wisdom of “pay your mortgage first.” They sometimes pay a late fee on their home loan to cover child care first, lest they lose coveted spaces in a center they trust.

Child care is in slow-motion crisis for middle-income families, and Middlesex County, N.J., is in the thick of it. With three of four mothers working outside the home --near the national average--this swath of suburbs dramatizes the cost to working families of the national political consensus that child care is a private, not public, responsibility.

For 30 years, politicians have promised to shift the burden for families in the middle, with little result. Vice President Al Gore recently called for tens of billions of dollars in spending and tax breaks over a decade to improve care from infancy through adolescence--a proposal advocates called impressive in its reach, but short on resources and details.

Texas Gov. George W. Bush has proposed initiatives only for the poor, saying working families can apply his proposed income tax cut to child care bills.

Would-be beneficiaries here had a feeling they’d heard that before.

“I was so hopeful when the Clintons came in,” said Popino, 34. “I saw Hillary as a working mom’s best friend. I remember she said, ‘It takes a village.’ OK, it’s been eight years. When are they going to get to my village?”

The politics of welfare reform has focused national attention and money on the vast child care needs of women in poverty, which remain unmet. And the economic boom is helping affluent families pay full-time nannies or the $800- to $1,000-a-month fees at new, high-quality centers.

But with a record 64% of mothers of preschoolers now employed, and day care ranked by the Census Bureau as the biggest expense of young families after food and housing, officials say middle-income families routinely are priced out of licensed centers and homes. The median income for families with two children is $45,500 annually, according to the Census Bureau.

“Basically, we have a market that isn’t working,” said Lynn White, executive director of the National Child Care Assn, which represents 7,000 providers.

In a booming economy in which almost any job pays better, day care centers now lose a third to more than half of their staffs each year, and licensed home caregivers have quit in droves, according to national surveys.

The average starting wage for assistant day care teachers nationally rose 1 cent in eight years--to $6 an hour. Weekly tuition at centers in six cities rose 19% to 83% in the same period as states tightened regulations.

Most industrialized countries invested heavily in early-childhood care as women surged into the work force in the 1970s, but Congress and a succession of presidents left the system here mostly to the marketplace, directly subsidizing only the poorest of the poor.

A federal child care tax credit, enacted in 1976, saves working families $3 billion, but advocates say it has fallen far behind inflation. (It saved Debra Harris $980 last year, leaving her cost at more than $7,000.)

When the military faced the same crisis of quality, affordability and supply a decade ago, Congress took a strikingly different approach. It financed a multibillion-dollar reform in the name of retaining top recruits and investing in future ones.

The result was a system of tightly enforced, high-quality standards for day care, home care and before- and after-school care. It included continual training of workers and more generous pay and benefits.

Advocates hail the system as a model. With 200,000 children in care, it costs an average of $7,200 a child, which the government subsidizes by income.

“The best chance a family has to be guaranteed affordable and high-quality care in this country is to join the military,” concluded an analysis by the National Women’s Law Center.

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The first time Washington tried to help--and failed--was 1971. Congress passed a $2-billion program to help communities develop child care for working families, but President Nixon vetoed it as ill conceived, writing in his veto message that it would “commit the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child-rearing over . . . the family-centered approach.”

Mothers of school-age children kept going to work anyway. In 1947, 27% were employed at least part time; in 1960 it was 43%; in 1980, 64%; in 1998, 78%. State governments took the lead in setting child care standards, which vary dramatically, as do fees and quality.

In the late 1980s, with the number of children in care surging, Congress again took up the cause of middle-income as well as poor families. The resulting Act for Better Childcare, signed by then-President Bush in 1990, vastly increased aid to the poor, whose needs were the most urgent. But middle-income families were left out.

Poor families’ needs became even more pressing in 1996 with the passage of welfare reform, which sent women from assistance rolls to the work force. A federal child care block grant aimed at families making up to 85% of a state’s median income is going overwhelmingly to families in or near poverty, reaching only 1 in 10 eligible children, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In 1998, President Clinton moved to expand the child care tax credit but was blocked by Republicans who said it slighted mothers who stayed home with their children.

This election year could be different, several analysts said. Although most voters care less about child care than Social Security and taxes, the issue rates highest with women younger than 50, particularly those under 30, a crucial voting bloc for both Bush and Gore.

Unlike 1996, when these women were solidly for Clinton, their concerns now have political cachet, according to Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

At the same time, advocates are linking quality child care to school readiness, hoping to tap into the national focus on education. They emphasize that the government subsidizes higher education for all families but not “early ed,” as they call child care, which impacts young families, who have fewer resources.

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Mary O’Mara, the mother who sometimes makes ends meet by paying late fees on her mortgage, said politicians who look past this issue must live in a different world than hers. She wishes she could show them what she showed her mother, who used to tell her to relax and stay home with her children.

“I sat her down with a calculator, and I gave her a month’s worth of bills--food, mortgage, child care, gasoline,” O’Mara said. “There was almost nothing left, and that’s with two middle-class incomes.

“She looked at me like she didn’t believe it. She said, ‘I didn’t realize how tough it was out there.’ ”