My husband and I are often asked when we are having a second child. While maybe not the most appropriate question, I assume they are asking with good intentions. And also because they see how wonderfully cute our son Jameson is and think the world needs more of that.
Over the past few months, I’ve started answering by saying, “When someone volunteers to pay for a second daycare tuition!” While I say it in jest, I also say it because it’s true.
Both of us have decent-paying jobs and three master’s degrees between the two of us. We manage our money well and paid off debt before having our son.
We have done everything in a way that society deems “right.” (I don’t believe there is a “right” way. People do what they need to do.)
Despite all that, we can’t afford to have a second child primarily because of the price of daycare, assuming we can even find a daycare with an open spot. Texas currently has 27% fewer childcare centers than before the pandemic.
What does navigating this reality look like? By the time I was ten weeks pregnant with our son, we had been placed on numerous waitlists. By the end of my maternity leave, the only daycare we had received placement for was part-time.
So, for about four and a half months, we had part-time childcare while both worked full-time. Doing the math, we were on ten different waitlists for a year and a half before getting a spot at one for full-time care.
That spot then cost us $930 a month.
If we had two children, our monthly daycare payments would be more than our mortgage. I don’t know about you, but I can’t afford a second mortgage.
Some may ask, “Why don’t you just stay home with your children instead of working?”
First, would you ask that question if I were a man? Probably not.
Second, I genuinely love my job and believe I’m called to do this vital work. Last, we can’t afford to do that either!
This is the situation many millennial families find themselves in— they can’t afford childcare for multiple children and cannot afford for one of the parents to stay home with the children either.
There are so many barriers to having children. The government is gatekeeping how and when to get pregnant and creating a world where only the wealthiest among us have access to resources to get pregnant.
If you do get pregnant, pregnancy is scary when you live in a state that won’t value your life if something goes wrong.
Even with good insurance, it is incredibly expensive to give birth. It took us about a year to pay the bills associated with the birth of our son and we had excellent health insurance.
There is little support for mothers around lactation services and pelvic floor therapy, and insurance often won’t pay for those services anyway. There is no federal paid maternity leave so parents go back to work before they are physically and emotionally healed from the trauma of childbirth.
All this and people ask why millennials aren’t having children! It’s maddening.
I also recognize that I have a lot of privilege in this conversation. I have health insurance, a flexible job, a supportive family and access to resources, all while being a heterosexual, middle-class, able-bodied white woman. There are a lot of privileges in my identity that impact this situation for me.
I’m a community social worker so my thoughts often go to policy and systems. When the Child Tax Credit was in place during Covid, child poverty decreased from 9.7% to 5.2%.
Within a month of its removal, child poverty increased by 3%. Those extra funds were just enough to make a difference in the everyday financial situation of families.
While I’m not hopeful the child tax credit will return, last week, President Biden shared that his administration plans to lower childcare costs in various ways. One is “ensuring most families pay less than $10 per day for childcare.”
We currently pay $43 a day for our daycare, which is not even among the top five most expensive places in Waco. Ten dollars a day would truly be life-changing for our family. That is just one of the many ways policy could drastically transform the lives of current and potential parents.
Why am I writing about this?
I’m not asking for a GoFundMe to send a future kid to daycare. (Although, if you know a well-off donor who wants to fund that, please send them my way.)
I’m sharing these realities because people who don’t have small children or aren’t in community with those who do aren’t aware of our challenges.
There is a childcare crisis and it’s impacting families – families that you know and love.
Policy matters. It affects our daily lives.
The current childcare crisis will only get worse if we don’t start paying attention to who is making our policies and who is being listened to when those policies are being made. Let’s think about who we’re voting into office and how they’re caring for our families.
A licensed social worker in Texas, she currently works at The Center for Church and Community Impact at the Garland School of Social Work at Baylor University.
