May 18, 2024 3 min read

If you have a child in a day care program, congratulations are in order. You were lucky that you were able to get them enrolled in one, given how long the waiting lists are at some child care centers.

And here’s something you might have noticed when you drop off your child in the morning or pick them up in the evening – there’s an awful lot of turnover at child care centers. A staffer who reads stories to your child, keeps an eye on them on the playground, monitors them as they eat or work on art projects and changes their diaper at least three or four times per day might be there for only a handful of months before they depart.

It’s not hard to understand why. Working in child care is very, very hard work, and it’s work that is not adequately compensated. Right now, the median wage for a child care worker is $15.48 per hour. Compare that to the average wage of an employee at a fast-food establishment in Pennsylvania, which is almost $18 per hour.

Leah Spangler, president and CEO of the Learning Lamp and Ignite Education Solutions nonprofit agency in Johnstown, said in a March legislative hearing that she had roughly 100 job openings and more than 500 children on a waiting list. She explained, “I don’t have a beer cave. I can’t sell lottery tickets. I can’t sell tobacco. How am I going to raise wages?”

But a paucity of available slots at child care centers and low wages are just two of the problems that have beset the child care industry right now. A third one is the simple reality that child care has become prohibitively expensive for many families.

On Wednesday, NBC-TV’s evening newscast aired a story about a Wisconsin couple, both of them nurses, who have found the cost of paying a mortgage, paying for child care, and covering all the other expenses of life to be so onerous that the father has decided to become a stay-at-home dad because the cost of day care was just too much for them to afford. For many families, the cost of day care meets or exceeds their monthly housing costs.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, child care is considered affordable when it costs families no more than 7% of their household income. That’s something most families can only dream about – it’s typically more like 24%.

With an election year in full swing and Congress and the presidency up for grabs, there’s not likely to be any kind of solution coming from the federal government anytime soon. A proposal from the Biden administration would spread $500 million among the states in block grants to lower the cost of child care for low-income families and increase the wages of child care workers. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Josh Shapiro has asked for $100 million for early learning, early intervention and child care programs. Advocates argue, though, that much more is needed.

Having an affordable and accessible child care system is vital to the U.S. economy and also vital for children, who acquire early developmental and social skills. Helping workers who provide child care and families who need it should be much more of a priority for lawmakers than it currently is.