Caring for Children - The Cost Of Child Care

In 2000 the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) published The High Cost of Child Care Puts Quality Care out of Reach for Many Families (Washington, DC), which surveyed child-care costs across the country. The survey showed that child care could easily cost a family $4,000 to $6,000 per year, and in some areas more than $10,000 per year. Child-care costs for a four-year-old ranged from $3,380 annually in Mississippi to a high of $8,121 in Massachusetts.

TABLE 3.6

Primary child care arrangements for children under age 5 with employed mothers, by age and family income
	All children under 5		Children under 3		3- and 4-year-olds
	Low-incomea	Higher-incomea	Low-income	Higher-income	Low-income	Higher-income
Note: Percentages for nonparental care may differ from sum of subcategory percentages due to rounding.
aLow-income is defined as below 200 percent of the federal poverty thresholds and higher-income as 200 percent of the federal poverty thresholds and above.
bParent/other category contains children whose mothers did not report the use of any regular child care arrangement while they worked.
SOURCE: Jeffrey Capizzano and Gina Adams, "Table 1. Primary Child Care Arrangements for Children under Age 5 with Employed Mothers, by Age and Family Income (Percent)," in Snapshots3 of America's Families: Children in Low-Income Families Are Less Likely to Be in Center-Based Child Care, no. 16, The Urban Institute, November 2003, http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/310923_snapshots3_no16.pdf (accessed August 24, 2004)
Nonparental	68.7	74.6	62.3	67.6	77.0	84.1
Center-based	24.9	31.2	16.2	20.6	36.4	45.5
Family child care	10.7	14.2	11.0	14.7	10.3	13.6
Nanny/baby-sitter	3.5	5.3	3.3	6.5	3.8	3.7
Relative	29.5	23.9	31.7	25.8	26.5	21.3
Parent/otherb	31.3	25.4	37.7	32.4	23.0	15.9

TABLE 3.7

Full-time shift workers by reason for working a non-daytime schedule, May 2001
(Percent distribution)
Reason for working a non-daytime schedule		Shift
	Total workers1	Evening	Night	Rotating	Split	Arranged	Other
1Includes persons who worked a non-daytime schedule, but did not report the shift worked.
2Includes persons who worked a non-daytime schedule, but did not report a reason.
Note: Data relate to the sole or principal job of full-time wage and salary workers and exclude all self-employed persons, regardless of whether or not their businesses were incorporated.
SOURCE: "Table 6. Full-Time Wage and Salary Shift Workers by Reason for Working a Non-Daytime Schedule, May 2001," in Workers on Flexible and Shift Schedules in 2001, Bureau of Labor Statistics, April 18, 2002, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/flex.t06.htm (accessed August 24, 2004)
Number2 (thousands)	14,461	4,816	3,318	2,315	446	2,804	706
Percent2	100.0	100.0	100.0	100.0	100.0	100.0	100.0
Better arrangements for family or childcare	8.9	12.1	14.9	3.0	7.1	2.5	5.8
Better pay	6.9	7.8	11.2	5.7	4.5	2.6	4.1
Allows time for school	3.3	6.1	2.5	2.1	2.1	1.2	.8
Could not get any other job	6.6	9.1	8.9	3.4	4.6	3.2	3.6
Nature of the job	53.3	38.9	32.0	76.8	65.1	79.5	67.2
Personal preference	13.3	17.3	21.5	3.3	10.2	6.4	10.0
Some other reason	6.2	7.2	7.2	4.8	5.9	4.2	8.5

For a twelve-month-old child, annual costs jumped to $3,692 in Mississippi and $12,978 in Massachusetts. And child care in urban care centers was so expensive that it could cost more than public college tuition.

Low-Income Families

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a low-income family with two parents working full time, fifty-two weeks a year, at the federal minimum wage earned $21,424 per year before taxes. The Children's Defense Fund estimated that such families could afford to pay no more than 10% of their income ($2,142 annually) on child care. The Census Bureau estimated that in 1999 the average family with a preschool child spent 8.6% of its income on child-care (Who's Minding the Kids? Child Care Arrangements: Spring 1999, January 23, 2003). Even if able to save 10% of their income for child care, many low-income families were forced to enroll their children in low-cost, and often poor-quality, child-care centers. As a result, these children spent much of their day in unstimulating and possibly unsafe environments.