Category: Child Care

Access to quality, affordable child care is critical for American working families, and it is a major focus of efforts to bring about more family-friendly workplaces. In this brief, we analyze families’ child care expenses and identify, among families with young children (under age 6) who pay for child care, the share that are “cost burdened,” defined here as spending more than 10 percent of their gross income on child care. Using data from the 2012–2016 Current Population Survey, we present our findings by number of children; age of youngest child; parental characteristics; family income measures; and U.S. region, metropolitan status, and state. Unless otherwise noted, families include only those with children under age 6 who had any child care costs in the previous year.

How often are low-income families pushed into poverty by their child care expenses? In this fact sheet, we use the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) to assess the extent to which child care expenses are pushing families with young children into poverty. Nearly one-third (30.4 percent) of families with young children are poor. To fall under the SPM poverty line means that a family’s income would be less than $26,000 a year on average, with variations by family composition and geographic location. Among poor families with young children, 12.3 percent incur child care expenses according to our analyses of the SPM. For families earning this little income, child care expense can be a burden. Of those who pay for child care, nearly one in ten (9.4 percent) are poor (Figure 1). Roughly one third of these poor families are pushed into poverty by child care expenses. This represents an estimated 207,000 families.1 Among families with young children who pay for child care, those with three or more children, those headed by a single parent, those with black or Hispanic household heads, and those headed by someone with less than a high school degree or by someone who does not work full time are most often pushed into poverty by child care expenses. Notably, these are also the families that tend to have the highest rates of poverty.

The high cost of child care is a barrier to employment among low-income families with young children. Child care subsidies are designed to support both parental employment and child development by lowering the cost of child care and making high-quality child care affordable to low-income families.

In this new Carsey Perspective, authors Jess Carson and Marybeth Mattingly describe the ways that the COVID-19 pandemic has strained the nation’s already-fragile early childhood care systems. Child care providers are struggling to address revenue losses associated with closures, fewer enrollments, and new safety guidelines. Meanwhile, demand for formal child care is shifting in yet-unknown ways, with unemployment, telework, uncertain school reopenings for older children, and health-related concerns all playing a part. The authors conclude that the child care system requires significant policy support to regain lost footage, but encourage policymakers to utilize the pandemic’s disruption as an opportunity to rebuild child care in more equitable and sustainable ways.

Working families with young children face substantial barriers in accessing and affording quality child care. Figure 1 shows that among working families with a child under age 3, those who do not pay for child care are more likely to live in poor or low-income families than those who do pay for child care (61 percent versus 45 percent).

This brief maps the distribution of children living with young adult parents, describes their parents’ characteristics, and details ways to strengthen policy supports that can fortify their families’ ability to succeed.

To unlock the potential of this region’s millions of children, Kidogo, an innovative East African social enterprise, is harnessing the power of social sector franchising. Kidogo partners with women running informal daycares in Kenya’s urban slums to better the condition and profitability of their micro-businesses. By working with local women entrepreneurs, “Mamapreneurs,” and drastically improving the quality of Kenya’s early childhood care and education, Kidogo is altering the course of low-income families to help stop the generational cycle of poverty.

According to research based on the 2004 Survey of Income and Program Participation, working families with young children living in poverty pay 32 percent of their income on child care, nearly five times more than families living at more than 200 percent of the poverty level. This brief asks policy makers to consider allowing more subsidies to be available to those who could benefit most from them.

In this data snapshot, author Jess Carson reports that data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau between January and May 2023 show that 70 percent of New England households with a child under five use child care, and more than one-third of those rely on multiple arrangements.