Increasingly, middle- and upper-middle-class parents are finding that day care is hard to find or access and that even when it is available it is startlingly costly.
The cost and the scarcity of day care has helped create what the sociologist Joya Misra calls “the motherhood penalty.” While women without children are closer to pay equity with men, women with children are lagging behind because they find that working doesn’t always make sense after considering the cost of child care. When women earn less than their partners, they are more likely to drop out of the work force, and if they do so for two years or more, they may not be able to get back in at anything approaching their prior job or earnings. The cost of taking care of one’s children outside the home is now so high that many women cannot be assured of both working and making a decent income after taxes and child care costs.
Even for experts like Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, 44, of Kirkland, Wash., a founder of a nonprofit group centered on these issues, MomsRising, obtaining day care isn’t easy. Ms. Rowe-Finkbeiner had a “heck of a time” getting her children off years-long waiting lists for local day care centers and preschools. “I applied early, and my daughter only got in when she was 3,” Ms. Rowe-Finkbeiner says. “Access is a problem across the socioeconomic spectrum.”
Across the world, though, people count on the availability of day care and see it as a collective good: Americans don’t tend to do so as readily. More access to quality early childhood care would help.
Source: The New York Times, August 18, 2013 excerpt from "The Great Divide" a series on inequality at www.nytimes.com/opinionator
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