The Mean Reds of Inflation & the Blues of Daycare
As of 2023 in the U.S., the annual median range of cost for daycare—for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers—is between $6,900 and upwards of $17,000. That’s between $575 and $1400 per kid, per month according to the U.S Department of Labor. Born and raised in Los Angeles, I’m still here with one kid, and I was quoted $3200 per month for my one kid when I was first researching daycare with a more high-end option. Currently, I happily pay $680 per month, split 50/50 with his dad, for part-time daycare which includes 6 hours, 4 days a week with 2 meals and 1 snack. Thankfully, I also personally know the person running the daycare, therefore I feel even more at ease taking him almost every day.
Most daycare bills are comparable to the cost of a mortgage, let alone not even what over half of American’s take home on their semi-monthly or monthly paychecks. This is not to say that daycare providers do not deserve to be compensated, because they along with school-aged teachers deserve innumerable compensation and recognition for the impact they have on these young minds. There are also insane people in this world and readily handing over your hard-earned money and children to strangers feels unhinged. Let me break this down a bit more.
When you become a parent, there is a spectrum of things people fail to tell you about. For instance, they don’t elaborate on how sleep deprivation can last well into their third or fourth year of life; how teething can start as early as 2 months old; how your partner will want to engage in the horizontal two-step as early as days or weeks after you give birth; how desperately you want them to stay home until they can talk well enough, so they can tell you what’s going on when they are with other people; or how debilitating the constant cycle of sickness at daycare impacts your life outside of your work-week like no other.
The duality of being able to work remote since the pandemic hit in March of 2020 is strange. I was 5 months pregnant when the pandemic hit. I didn’t have a baby shower, I had to go to most of my prenatal appointments alone and gave birth with only my child’s father present, in a mask. While I work in lounge clothes most days, I still work for a company, which means that they can dictate their expectations. While I’ve been generally lucky with my direct management, it can be challenging when you’re nursing, your baby becomes mobile or when they’re sick; but sick is the most challenging in my opinion. They only want you and they won’t understand the concept of “work”. Companies are not truly interested in what you have going on outside of them and since many are moving into hybrid work, there is this increased lack of trust even if you’ve remained a top performer in the remote setting. Family clearly comes first, but there still needs to be money made to provide. Additionally, the coined “work-life balance” term is interesting, as folks working traditional jobs will always spend more time with their coworkers than they do with their family. Truth be told, self-employed folks probably work more, but at least they have the liberty to dictate how it weaves into their family life.
Back to daycare. When my kid is sick, he stays home for a few days, so he does not pass it on to his other classmates. Now, I realize that because I work from home, that’s convenient for me to ensure he’s okay and that he won’t be infecting anyone else’s kids; but not all parents have that accommodation with work, and they have limited options outside of daycare. Many grandparents are still working and even so, the dynamic of “granny or pawpaw” being available to watch the grandkids is different these days. Therefore, the cycle of your kid being sick repeats itself every 2-3 weeks, which also translates to them passing that sickness onto you. This impacts your ability to rest and prevents you from showing up how you need to for everyone. It is a vicious cycle that must start with society actually caring about humans. Rest is seen as weak. A few days ago, a good friend of mine, who also happens to be a mother of 2, cited “Rest isn’t productive,” and I quickly did my best to reframe her thinking. We create our reality with the words we speak and while that sentence is indicative of how the world views how we should spend our time, big picture, that thinking does nothing for us.
I’ve touched on a lot of points so far and while much of this is wildly nuanced and deserves to be talked about with more granularity, my goal here is to further highlight that if we want things to be different, we must be willing to go about it differently. We need MORE community and we need to start acting like we care about each other. The world has convinced us that single parents and/or nuclear families are equipped to handle the mental, physical, emotional, and financial load of raising children. Choices are made to bring said kids into the world; however, people are literally and figuratively fighting for their lives and sanity trying to prove that they can do this with limited help, while we should be more focused on cultivating a village to tackle these coarse ways of “pushing through”.
“That’s just how it is” or “I had to do it” does not cut it. Inflation is killing everyone, everywhere; the political climate is outrageous, and the overall outlook of America’s future seems shaky at best. At the very least if we know we can set our children up for something positively different by utilizing community as a resource, maybe everything else can follow suit?
Sources: https://blog.dol.gov/2023/01/24/new-childcare-data-shows-prices-are-untenable-for-families