The Real Costs of Child Care

It’s not just the high housing costs in Orange County that disproportionately rob low-income families of their purchasing power. High child-care costs are a second slam to their already strained budget. And that’s if they can even find it.

According to the recently released seventh annual Report on the Conditions of Children in Orange County, which studied issues impacting the county’s estimated 700,000 youngsters, the demand for child care keeps rising, but “the number of family child care homes and centers actually decreased.”

That’s a problem that affects the entire community. And it deserves a coordinated community effort--not only to find more child care but good-quality care that is affordable by those with the greatest need.

How bad is the problem? The Children’s Defense Fund estimates that each day 7 million school-age children nationwide are left without supervision after school. The problems of cost and availability grow even greater for preschoolers, especially in Orange County.

Requests for day care services here increased 26% in the last five years, with the greatest number coming for infants from birth to 2 years. But fewer than 5% of all spaces in licensed child care centers are for children under 2. The latest totals show about 8,000 children on the eligibility list for parents seeking financial assistance for child care.

Nationwide, poor families spend 35% of their income on child care, compared with 7% for those with higher incomes. In Orange County, with its high child care costs, a family making minimum wage would have to spend 70% of its income to place an infant in a licensed care center. A family earning the county’s median wage would spend 7%.

U.S. Census Bureau data forecasts that by 2010, 85% of California’s work force will consist of parents. But today, licensed child care meets only about 20% of the state’s need.

More affordable child care and increased subsidies at the federal, state and local levels are needed. The private sector could help by providing child care at the work site, especially in the industries with nontraditional work hours, such as nights and weekends.

Communities need to begin looking at child care as an essential need that gets the priority attention it deserves. The alternative to providing more affordable child care, and subsidies for those too poor to even pay that, is higher unemployment and welfare costs for mothers who would, and could, work--if only they could find baby-sitting. And more unsupervised school-age children roaming neighborhoods after school.

It’s a poor tradeoff for everyone.