Cassidy Weyel was raised by a stay-at-home mother but always planned to return to work after having a child. What surprised her was just how steep child care expenses would be. She didn’t fully grasp the cost until she was midway through her pregnancy. “I started looking into it, and my jaw dropped,” she says. “I practically felt like I was giving birth right there when I saw the prices.”
Weyel, who lives in Tampa, Florida, pays $160 a week for child care for her 21-month-old son, Aurelius. She and her partner, Nick Fewell, secured a spot at an in-home day care when Aurelius was about 3 months old, just before Weyel went back to work from maternity leave.
Although the weekly fee covers full-day care Monday through Friday, Weyel leaves work at 2 p.m. each day to pick her son up early. She then works from home for a couple of hours in the late afternoon to avoid rush-hour traffic.
As it stands, Weyel spends more than two hours a day commuting because their child care provider isn’t located near either her home or her workplace.
Fewell frequently travels for his job as an underground utility technician, so Weyel handles most of the drop-offs and pick-ups. Her role as a writer for the Home Shopping Network offers more flexibility.
Despite the tiring commute, the detour to Aurelius’ in-home provider is worthwhile.
“He adores it there, and he’s flourishing,” Weyel says.
Because the home never cares for more than six children, Weyel believes her son gets more focused attention than he would at a larger center with many more kids.
One more perk of an in-home provider versus a larger center is the price.
Weyel figures she’d be paying at least $40 extra each week — nearly an additional weekly payment every month — if they’d chosen a traditional child care center. Center rates can be pricy, and hiring a nanny would cost even more.
“I wanted to cut costs where I could,” she says.
Still, child care consumes roughly a quarter of Weyel’s paycheck.
“Money Vanishes Quickly”
Weyel pays her provider by writing personal checks each week. As a 30-year-old millennial accustomed to paying bills online, she must be extra vigilant about budgeting and tracking balances since it can take a few days for the checks to clear.
“It does get tight at the end of the pay period where I have overdrafted checks,” she admits.
There have been moments when she’s had to make difficult choices about which bills to cover. Weyel was diagnosed with thyroid cancer at 24 and carries related medical expenses. She has medical bills she hasn’t been able to settle.
“Having that and then also juggling the competing costs of raising a child — it gets heavy sometimes,” she says.
Weyel wishes she and Fewell had built a financial cushion, but buying a house about a year and a half ago depleted their savings. With child care costs, “Money disappears quickly,” Weyel says. There’s little left to tuck away each month.
Weyel finds it amusing that when people discuss how costly it is to have a baby, they often point to diapers and formula.
“That’s just a tiny portion,” she says. “What really eats up a huge chunk is day care.”
After their mortgage, child care is the household’s largest expense.
The Price of Child Care Across the U.S.
Weyel’s experience isn’t an outlier. Parents nationwide are feeling squeezed by child care costs.
A survey of 1,224 parents with at least one child under age 6 found the vast majority — 95% — said they often or sometimes feel overwhelmed by child care expenses.
An analysis of U.S. Census microdata shows the average American parent with one child under 6 spent about $433 per month on child care in 2017. Yet 82% of those surveyed reported spending $500 or more monthly. Just over a third — 35.5% — spent $1,000 or more each month.
Half of the parents we surveyed devoted at least 15% of their income to child care.
New America, an independent think tank, partnered with Care.com to publish The Care Index in 2016. That report found the average child care center in the U.S. charged $9,589 a year for full-time care for children under 5.
That amount equals about 85% of the typical annual rent cost. It’s $179 more than the average yearly in-state college tuition.
While 18-year-olds might take out loans, work through college or opt not to attend when families can’t pay, an 18-month-old has none of those options. There’s also far less time to save for child care than for college.
It’s no surprise parents are delaying having children — and choosing to have fewer kids.
Like Weyel, many new parents are blindsided by how much they’ll pay for child care. About three-quarters of those surveyed said their child care costs were higher than they initially expected.
Eighty-five percent of parents said they hadn’t saved specifically for child care before their baby arrived.
If it feels like the situation is deteriorating, that’s because it is. Household income increases have not kept pace with growing child care spending. A review of Census microdata shows household income rose 8% from 2011 to 2017, while parents’ child care spending escalated 27%.
To cover child care costs, parents must often make major financial sacrifices. Among those surveyed, 91% said they haven’t been able to build savings and 81% said they haven’t been able to reduce debt.
Nearly three in 10 parents have gone into debt to pay for child care.
More Children Means a Bigger Bill
Covering child care for one child can be hard; for multiple children, it’s even tougher.
Jessica Nava lives in Egg Harbor City, New Jersey, and is a 31-year-old mother of three — Grace, 6; Luka, 3; and Noah, 2.
When Nava had her first child, she was a single mom waiting tables at Red Robin. Income was tight and unpredictable.
“It wasn’t a steady paycheck,” she says. “One week I might make $700 or $800, and the next week, if business was slow… I could be stuck with two shifts and only $200.”
Nava pursued a management role to secure a steadier income. She chose an in-home provider for her daughter — the same caregiver who had watched her older sister’s children years earlier. Nava recalls the $40-a-day cost was cheaper than most local options, some of which charged nearly a whole paycheck.
Even so, it was a struggle to make ends meet.
For about six months, Nava frequently withdrew more from ATMs than her account balance allowed. Bank of America added a $30 overdraft fee, but she could still withdraw up to $300 beyond her balance, she remembers.
“It felt like a small short-term loan from the bank that I had to rely on, because I was short every week just from paying for child care and rent,” Nava says.
When she had her second child, Nava was no longer a single parent, but child care still consumed a large portion of the two-income household she shared with her husband, Hugo Nava. They paid $60 a day for care about four days a week, using roughly 20% of their household income.
When their youngest arrived, the daily rate rose to $80.
The strain wasn’t only financial. Long hours spent apart created pressure on family life.
“In restaurant work you don’t often work neat eight-hour shifts,” says Jessica Nava, who used to work 12- to 13-hour days.
Her husband also worked in hospitality.
When her middle child was 7 months old, Nava left food service — a demanding and stressful job — and moved into a role that let her be more present with her family. She’s now a contract administrator for a local plumbing firm. The Navas have been able to lower child care costs by coordinating work schedules more strategically.
Jessica works roughly 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and her husband, a bartender, typically starts his shifts around 4 p.m. or 5 p.m. Hugo often swaps shifts with coworkers so their schedules align with the family’s needs.
To cover the gap between when Hugo leaves for work and Jessica gets home, the Navas hire college students to babysit in their house.
Working opposite shifts transformed their family’s finances. By trimming their child care requirements, the family now spends nearly what they once paid per day for all three children.
The arrangement also helps the children.
“Above all, I think our kids have benefited from a sense of stability,” Jessica Nava says. “Before, they were constantly being shuttled around, which left little time for cooking a healthy family meal or maintaining a consistent bedtime.”
Although the family is saving money, Jessica says their schedule places strain on their relationship. They only have two nights a week off together.
“We have to work hard to schedule family time, couple time and personal time,” she says. “We try to plan a family outing every other week on our shared nights off, and then make time for a playground or family activity on Saturday mornings before Hugo works.”
Nava wishes there were more support for working parents around child care affordability.
“I always felt that quality child care should be a bit more affordable so families aren’t forced to choose between early education and paying the electric bill,” she says. “We weren’t there financially for a while, but we got through it.”
Data journalist Alex Mahadevan contributed to this article.
Nicole Dow is a senior writer at Savinly. She is a single mother of a preschooler. About 15% of her monthly take-home pay goes to child care.
