When it comes to the affordability crisis in child care, Lenice Emanuel says that it’s forcing families to take a hard look at their budgets — no matter their income level.

But as child care costs surpass the price of rent in some areas, those money choices are even more extreme for folks on the margins, explains Emanuel, executive director of the Alabama Institute for Social Justice.

“They’re gonna say, ‘We had to make a decision whether my husband stays home or I stay home because we both work, and we still can’t afford to pay the mortgage and child care,’” Emanuel says. “It’s just exacerbated for marginalized people, because they were already contending with deprivation, so these issues are just basically compounding what they were already dealing with. That’s why this is like a national crisis at this point.”

A recent analysis of the 100 largest U.S. metro areas found that the cost of child care for a family with two young children is more expensive than the average rent in each respective market.

Care for one child costs, on average, about 25 percent less than rent, according to the data from LendingTree. That changes with the addition of a second child, pushing child care costs up to more than double that of the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in markets like Omaha, Nebraska, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The numbers are much the same as they were last year, according to the analysis, with average rent prices increasing slightly. The national average price tag of care for one child has increased by about $3,700 since 2017, coming to about $13,100 per year in 2024.

Despite rising costs, child care workers are not feeling those increases reflected in their paychecks. It’s a sector that continues to struggle with thin margins, low wages, retaining workers and insufficient subsidies.

Managing Costs

Child care providers are caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to deciding how to price their services, says Tyrone Scott, director of government and external affairs at First Up, an early childhood education advocacy group in Pennsylvania.

That’s because they’re trying to keep prices low enough for families to afford, which can be a struggle even with public-dollar subsidies, while paying their staff fairly. Scott says that the average wage for child care workers is $15 per hour in Pennsylvania, which is not enough to compete with big box retailers and convenience stores that offer a starting rate of $17 or more with no experience or degree required.

“The Wawa near me has a $5,000 signing bonus,” Scott says of the retail chain. “If you are a high school student who just graduated, you can get $5,000 and start at $21 an hour where I’m at. So you are doing much better than our teachers, which is really problematic, obviously.”

Inflation is another factor squeezing child care providers, Scott says, increasing the price of everything the food stocked in the kitchen to liability insurance — with some child care providers reporting that their insurance expenses have tripled. Those centers have to choose between eating the costs and taking in thinner margins or passing them along to parents by raising prices.

Jasmine Bowles, executive state director of 9to5 Georgia, says Georgia’s child care system has long been underfunded — despite politicians’ crowing about the state’s billions of dollars in budget surplus funds. Administrative delays in state reimbursements to child care providers also force them to go without, she says, to ensure the learners in their care have everything they need.

“When our care providers receive their class of students for the day, those babies still eat, even if [the providers] haven’t been paid from the state for a month or more,” she says. “This really manifests itself in housing, food, and health insecurity for the very caregivers that our communities depend on.”

Emanuel says that Alabama’s formula for calculating how much of child care costs the state will subsidize doesn’t accurately reflect the cost, which leaves providers to figure out how to make up the difference. Those costs are often passed on to parents, but Emanuel says providers also apply for grants or take second jobs to keep their centers running.

“Because of the way the market rate survey dictates the reimbursement rates, a parent could be paying $400, but it’s actually costing the provider $900 a month for child care,” she explains. “Many of these women do child care full time, and they actually have side hustles in order for them to be able to provide child care.”

Child care providers are not spared from rising costs for their own kids, Emanuel says. One provider in her state reports paying 80 percent of her own income for care for her own children.

The Attitude Factor

With the widespread challenges in child care affordability, experts say that one barrier to getting more state funding to address the problem is both the public’s and lawmakers’ perception of child care — including who should be doing the caring.

“I think there is some old school mentality in some legislators that still believes children should be at home with their mothers — specifically mothers. Not fathers even, but mothers,” Scott says. “That’s not the reality for a lot of families, whether you’re talking to a two-parent family or a single-parent family — most children need every available adult in the workforce to make ends meet. So there’s this myth that people don’t want to care for their own kids, or whatever, for lack of a better term, sexist trope that people put on.”

Scott and Emanuel both say that there are large swaths of the public who don’t see the benefit of their states subsidizing child care, be it support for working parents or the advantages of giving kids a strong start in their education.

“I think that a lot of times in this state, people see child care as, ‘You had the child, it’s your responsibility to pay for child care,’” Emanuel says. “But if the pandemic didn’t teach us anything else, it taught us that it is critical infrastructure because, without child care, people are not able to go to work.”

Scott says one alliance that has helped get their message across is help from Pennsylvania chambers of commerce, who can describe how the lack of affordable child care options interferes with employees’ ability to stick to their work schedules.

Emanuel says there’s another aspect of the debate over child care funding that can’t be ignored: who is doing the work.

Many Alabama child care centers are run and staffed by Black women, she says, whose labor has a long history of being undervalued. For child care providers, Emanuel says that means they are seen as babysitters rather than educators.

“A lot of the morale of these women is often times just diminished because everything about the system in child care, it’s saying to them repetitively that, ‘We don’t value you,’ and ‘You aren’t important,’” Emanuel says, “because when you do value a thing, then you’re going to tie the resources and the infrastructure in place to ensure a specific end.”

Bowles echoed Emanuel’s sentiments in Georgia, saying that the state’s historical reliance on unpaid labor is a factor in the undervaluing of child care work. There’s a disconnect between, she says, the desire of lawmakers to make the state appealing to businesses and policies that make life easier for workers — like affordable child care, health care and food.

Beyond her role as an advocate, Bowles also has the perspective of someone who sits on the board of directors for her local school district in Georgia. After the start of the coronavirus pandemic, she had a front row seat to how schools grappled with students losing ground in their academic and social skills when in-person classes restarted.

“When we get our young people in the class, we start to see the impact of those learning gaps, and I think that was most keen in our earliest learners,” Bowles says. “My district in particular has started to rethink a traditional public school district’s responsibility for [early childhood education]. We’re also starting to incorporate more pre-K classrooms, because it really is becoming the responsibility of all of us, not just day care centers, to close these gaps.”