State Needs to Step Up and Fix Child Care
David R. Jones, The Urban Agenda
Finding quality, affordable child care has long been one of the greatest riddles for working parents in New York, but the challenge has reached crisis levels since the COVID-19 pandemic. Day care has become unaffordable for nearly everyone.
Families across New York are being crushed by child care expenses, assuming you can even find a day care provider. The numbers are sky high, with the typical family spending 27 percent of its income to pay for child care for one kid, according to Goldman Sachs. That’s fourfold the seven percent that the federal government deems affordable.
The New York State Assembly and Governor Kathy Hochul must step in with a major, multi-year program to rebuild the state’s child care infrastructure. Albany has taken some actions, but they are baby steps considering the severity of the problem. Child care is fueling a large and fast-growing group of people stressed to just keep themselves and their families afloat. Clearly, child care is out of reach for low-income families, immigrants and essential workers.
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) crunched the numbers, and they are mind-boggling: The average cost of infant care in New York State is $1,283 per month, while care for a 4-year-old costs $1,030 each month. That means, on average, day care for two children — an infant and a 4-year-old — costs $27,752 annually. That’s 47.1 percent more than average yearly rent in the state, EPI concluded.
New York City average prices are even higher, according to the NYC Comptroller: $16,250 a year for children under the age of 2; $11,648 a year on children between 3 and 5; and $9,620 a year for school-age children (6-12). If you wanted to spend less than seven percent of your income on center-based day care, you’d need to earn more than $112 an hour, or $224,000 annually.
Gov. Hochul last year redirected $500 million in unused federal money toward longevity and sign-on bonuses to fortify the ranks of child care workers. She has pledged to raise the income eligibility limit for state child care assistance and take other steps. That was a great start. Her 2025 executive budget includes another $100 million, divided between tax incentives for businesses to offer employee child care and grants for the construction of new child care centers.
The Empire State Campaign for Child Care, a coalition of day care advocates, calls for making taxpayer-subsidy of day care workers’ pay a permanent budget item. The group also calls for an array of state tax credits for day care center operators and higher pay for caregivers serving the homeless and families during non-traditional hours, such as the night shift.
New York lawmakers, who have the power to pump up the child care market, should adopt the coalition’s ideas and immediately expand tax credits for families to take some of the bite out of day care. The federal tax credit, which also covers elder care, is modest: You can claim from 20 percent to 35 percent of your care expenses, up to a maximum of $3,000 for one person, or $6,000 for two or more people.
The pandemic decimated New York’s child care infrastructure. Even centers that stayed open during the coronavirus surges may not be able to handle today the same number of children they served in the past. Hybrid and at-home work sharply cut back on day care hours, hurting child care employment.
As a result, child care centers today face severe staffing shortages, which figured in the governor’s focus on workforce grants to center-based caregivers. Private nannies and babysitters have also reduced their hours or dramatically raised prices.
All of this matters because the absence of child care undercuts hard-fought gains nationally for women in the workplace. One in four moms – especially women of color – have cut back on their hours or exited the work force entirely due to lack of child care, according to leanin.org and the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Pay inequity also puts women in New York at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to affording child care. For women working full-time, year-round New York’s pay gap is approximately 12 percent. It is more than double that for Black women (34 percent).
This issue deserves immediate, forward-thinking consideration. Safe, affordable child care promotes every family’s long-term economic outlook. It improves the parents’ ability to find meaningful work. It improves the life of children in the same way affordable housing and quality early childhood education are linked to improved health and achievement. It also benefits the care providers, who overwhelmingly tend to be Black women.
We must act to break the unjust conundrum – which befalls mostly women – of an inability to work due to a lack of affordable child care, or an inability to afford child care due to lack of work.