How child care costs became the 'kitchen table issue' for parents this election season

Christina Parker should be able to live comfortably in Mill Valley, California, a leafy suburb north of San Francisco on her six-figure salary working for a real estate developer. Instead she watches her checking account slowly empty all month long until there’s nearly nothing left. 

“I am working so hard and I have less than $100 in the bank,” Parker, 42, said.

Rent, electricity, groceries, car insurance – everything costs more than it used to, but it’s her 2-year-old son's day care that busts her budget. And that $3,000-a-month expense – as much as she pays for rent – just keeps going up. 

Next year she will enroll her son in a pricier preschool and she’ll have to tack on the cost of supplemental child care in the mornings and evenings during her commute. 

“I have a good job,” Parker said, “but I am barely making it.” 

For families with young children, child care is where inflation hits the hardest – a major fixed expense that only looms larger as pandemic-era federal spending dries up. 

Driven by a national shortage of workers and facilities, the costs of day care and preschool are rising at nearly twice the pace of inflation, devastating household finances for low- and middle-income families.

The average cost of care for two children is more expensive than the average rent in all 50 states and the average mortgage payment in 45 states, according to a report by the nonprofit Child Care Aware of America.

And these runaway costs influence how parents of young children – especially mothers – plan to vote in November. 

Nearly 9 in 10 parents surveyed by Care.com said a political candidate’s position on child care access and affordability would help determine their vote. 

Parker says she’s one of them. She signed a petition to make child care one of the questions asked during the first presidential debate in June. Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump never mentioned child care in his answer, which he mostly used to slam then-Democratic candidate President Joe Biden.

Biden, who has since been replaced on the Democratic ticket by Vice President Kamala Harris, argued for increasing the child care tax credit, but mostly sparred with Trump.

“I was so deflated, I stopped watching,” Parker said. “Why isn't this a priority?” 

Inflation, child care costs drain savings

The COVID-19 pandemic plunged an already fragile industry into a crisis but, even before the coronavirus tore through the country, parents had to scramble to find child care.

As of 2018, half of Americans lived in “child care deserts,” areas with too few licensed child care providers. If families are lucky enough to find a spot, the cost is often prohibitive.

On average, parents spent 24% of their household income on child care with nearly half forking over more than $18,000 in 2023, according to an annual survey from Care.com. undefined

To cover the rising costs, parents work multiple jobs, cut their hours at work or move closer to family. Still others are forced into debt or out of the workforce. More than one-third drained 42% of their savings to pay for child care last year, Care.com found.

Barbara Grant Boneta’s monthly child care tab of $1,300 in Austin, Texas, is half of what she used to pay in Washington, D.C., but she still struggles to afford it. 

“The cost of child care is higher than the cost of in-state college tuition, which is wild,” said Boneta, 36, director of United Way’s Success by 6 coalition. “It’s entirely too much.”

Day care for her daughter costs Christine O'Hare Barringer nearly $1,800 a month – more than her mortgage and 20% of her family’s take-home pay. 

That expense alone has changed how she thinks about and plans for the future. 

“We’d love to have a second kid, but we can’t afford one right now,” said Barringer, a 32-year-old mom from Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, who works in higher education fundraising.

More than half of women voters who live with a child under the age of 18 said they worry “a lot” or “some” about affording child care, according to a poll from nonprofit health policy research and polling firm KFF. 

“I have been surprised at how little this has been discussed this election cycle when we know it is one of the most important issues for our businesses and for our parents,” said Brenda Shields, a Republican state representative in Missouri who is sponsoring a child care tax credit bill and a longtime advocate for making safe and reliable child care more widely accessible and affordable.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation estimated that states across the country lose billions of dollars in economic activity because of breakdowns in the child care system.

“Infrastructure, it’s not just roads and bridges,” Shields said. “We have to think about child care as infrastructure.”

Voters want Trump, Harris to address child care crisis

Lisa Gray, 43, a mother of three from Kansas City, Kansas, who works full time for a nonprofit, says she wants to hear more from both presidential candidates on how they would ease the financial strain on families.

Lack of affordable child care disproportionately affects women’s ability to fully participate in the workforce. Research shows that women still shoulder most child care responsibilities.

Child care for Gray’s youngest son is $22,000 a year – nearly 20% of her family’s take-home pay and their second-largest monthly expense after rent. There’s nothing leftover to pay for after-school care for her two older boys or for more than a few weeks of camp each summer so Gray has to pick up the slack.

“Child care is a primary economic issue,” Gray said. “It’s a kitchen table issue.”

The vast majority of voters – 89% – want candidates to have a plan to address the child care crisis, according to a recent poll from First Five Years Fund, which advocates for affordable access to child care. That cuts across party lines, with 80% of Republicans, 88% of independents, and 99% of Democrats.

But so far voters don’t have enough information about where either presidential candidate stands to make a reasoned decision, said Javaid E. Siddiqi, CEO of educational nonprofit the Hunt Institute.

“I don't think either candidate right now has a really robust plan,” Siddiqi said. “Honestly, neither one has put out enough to say this is what you’re going to get out of a Harris administration or a Trump administration as it relates to early learning and early care.”

The Biden administration sought to invest billions of taxpayer dollars into making child care more affordable and the “care economy” is a key plank of Harris’ presidential campaign. 

Harris, who mentioned child care several times during her debate with Trump, has pledged to permanently increase the child tax credit and create a one-time $6,000 credit for newborns. 

“No family, no working family, should pay more than 7% of their household income in child care," Harris said last month, though she did not explain how she would achieve that or how she would pay for it.

Her running mate, Tim Walz, also champions the care economy. He established paid family leave and a child tax credit as governor of Minnesota.

Trump, who doubled the child tax credit and established paid leave for federal employees while in office, has said he would consider expanding the child tax credit but has not announced any formal plans.

When asked this month at an event hosted by the Economic Club of New York how he would help parents with child care, Trump said it was “a very important issue” then gave a rambling answer about how the cost of child care paled in comparison to the “trillions” he would add through levying new tariffs and taxing foreign nations.

His running mate, J.D. Vance, has proposed boosting the child tax credit. Vance has also argued that children benefit from a family member at home and that parents should lean on grandparents and other relatives for child care. 

Tax credit or cut taxes: Parents disagree on solutions

“Voters are concerned about the cost of day care and it’s not getting enough attention,” said Reshma Saujani, the Economic Club of New York board member who asked Trump the child-care question.

Her organization, Moms First, mobilized thousands of moms across the country to share their child care stories, catapulting the topic onto the national stage.

The Moms First campaign netted a win last week when the vice presidential candidates spent nearly eight minutes debating solutions to the child care crisis.

“Not enough politicians and elected officials have put enough thought into figuring out how to fix our broken child care system,” Saujani said.

Gemma Hartley knows how broken it is firsthand. 

A 36-year-old author and mother of three from Reno, Nevada, Hartley said she started an in-home child care when her oldest was an infant because she wasn’t making enough at the time to afford child care. But the long days and low wages took a toll and she closed down a year and a half later. 

Hartley took on flexible work to watch her kids at home, and both sets of grandparents eventually chipped in money to help cover preschool expenses. Hartley said her oldest two went to an academy that cost about as much as college tuition. Her youngest went to a church-run school.

A 2023 report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a private philanthropy based in Baltimore, found married couples with children in Nevada pay a bigger percentage of their income for child care than any other state.  

Hartley said child care is a key issue for her and she backs Harris’ plans to reinstate the higher child tax credit. 

Not everyone agrees with that approach. Some parents worry that too much government intervention could limit choice by favoring one form of child care over others.

“Is child care one of the biggest factors for me? Honestly, no. It’s making sure I can keep more of my money so I can put that towards paying for child care,” said Patrice Onwuka, 42, economic policy director at the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative nonprofit, and a mother of three from Bowie, Maryland.

Onwuka says she wants families to have more choices and more freedom to decide what works for them. “When I’m thinking about voting, I am thinking, not just for child care, but across the board: How are you expanding options? How are you ensuring that my family can choose what we want rather than trying to say this is the best place for everyone to go to?” 

Choice is also a top priority for Kelsey Bolar, who is pregnant with twins. 

Subsidizing daycare wouldn’t help families who struggle to afford child care but who don’t enroll kids in daycare, said Bolar, 35, who also works for the Independent Women’s Forum.

“There’s no easy solution when it comes to child care,” she said. 

Bolar said employing an au pair – a person between 18 and 26 years old brought to the country to live with families and care for children under a federal program administered by the State Department – is more affordable for her family than putting her three kids in daycare. 

A Biden administration proposal last year to overhaul how host families would pay au pairs, including changing hourly rates and adding overtime pay, would have made the arrangement too expensive for families like hers, she said. The proposal, which drew 11,000 comments, received bipartisan pushback, but Bolar worries Harris would drive up prices for the au pair program if she wins the election.

"It is frustrating to hear Vice President Kamala Harris out there on the campaign trail claiming to want to make child care more affordable for working families when her administration did the exact opposite with this proposal,” she said.