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July 18, 2001
Day Care Costs More Than College
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The Monitor cites one recent study's finding that a year of child care in virtually any part of the country costs more than the annual tuition at a public university - in some cases twice as much.
In 1998, the average annual tuition for a 4-year-old to attend full-time child care ranged from $4,000 to $6,000. Meanwhile, annual tuition and fees at a four-year public college or university averaged $3,243, the study noted.
In some areas, like booming Northern Virginia, child-care costs can easily top $10,000 a year per child and account for 10 to 25 percent of a household's budget.
Experts tell the Monitor that the financial burden falls especially hard on young families who are still gaining their financial footing.
"Families that earn between $25,000 and $50,000 are the most squeezed," says Anne Mitchell, president of Early Childhood Policy Research, an independent consulting firm in Climax, N.Y., and a co-author of the study.
Tax credits for child care, she says, favor families in the upper-income bracket who have more tax liability. Public programs, on the other hand, aim to help poor families.
Middle-income families "earn too much to be eligible for almost any state's subsidy system," Mitchell says.
As a result, many middle-income parents are forced to choose between "quality child care, mediocre, and sometimes just-OK child care," she says. "It can be a wrenching decision, because you can see things that you can't afford that you'd like to afford. We should care enough as a society not to force parents into that dilemma."
The problem forces some parents not to work or to work fewer hours, according to the authors of "Child Care Expenses of America's Families," a study issued last year by the nonpartisan Urban Institute in Washington.
Those in two-parent households may work different shifts to avoid expenses. And some ultimately place their children in care they consider unsatisfactory, because other arrangements are too expensive, the Urban Institute says.
The Monitor notes that nearly every other industrialized nation has some type of publicly funded system for early-childhood care. In France, children between the ages of 2 1/2 and 6 receive free, universal preschool, notes Faith Wohl, president of the Child Care Action Campaign, an advocacy group based in New York City.
"Over 99 percent of French children go there, whether their mothers or fathers work or not," she says.
While she doesn't believe such a federally operated child-care system would work in the U.S., Wohl sees some states moving "aggressively" toward universal preschool for children as young as age 3.
"If we could get the public sector to accept the responsibility that preschool education has as much social value as we see in elementary education, that could take care of the 3- and 4-year olds," Wohl says. "Then we could get the private sector to focus their resources on infants and toddlers."
Others, however, say the government should simply cut taxes and allow families to use their extra income as they see fit - whether it's to cover the cost of child care, or to ease the financial burden that occurs when one parent leaves a job to stay with a child.
"We should honor both of those choices," says Robert Rector, senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington. "Instead of raising taxes even more so the government can put kids into free day care, we ought to be rolling those taxes back," he says, adding that "institutionalized day care is not a big favorite of most parents."
President Bush's recently enacted tax-cut measure doubles the child tax credit to $1,000 per child. But Rector advocates raising the amount to $2,000 for each preschool-age child. This would help parents during the time of "maximum financial stress on the family," he says.
To view the Christian Science Monitor story, click here.