How the True Cost of Childcare Burdens Families, Providers and the Economy

KQED's Forum

KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2023

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Parents of young kids in California often find that childcare is not only expensive, but also hard to secure and even more so for low-income families. The cost of childcare eats up between 8 and 19 percent of family household income, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. While high costs and lack of availability have been problems for decades, the pandemic made it worse. Numerous childcare centers across California closed permanently in the past few years, even though demand has remained constant. We’ll talk about why childcare is so expensive and efforts at the state level to bring down the costs for families and improve working conditions for providers. Guests: Daisy Nguyen, early childhood education and care reporter, KQED Deo Agustin, founder and owner, Mind Builder Center - a licensed in-home childcare center in San Jose Anna Powell , senior research and policy associate, Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, University of California, Berkeley Monique Limón, Senator, California State Senate - She represents the 19th Senate district that includes the Santa Barbara County and half of Ventura County Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:00.0	Support for Kikiweedy Podcasts comes from Rancho La Puerta, a resort with 85 years of wellness experience.
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0:15.7	Support for Forum comes from Broadway S.F. presenting Parade, the musical revival based on a true story.
0:23.5	From three-time Tony-winning composer Jason Robert Brown comes the story of Leo and Lucille Frank,
0:29.8	a newlywed Jewish couple struggling to make a life in Georgia. When Leo is accused of an
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0:43.6	The riveting and gloriously hopeful parade plays the Orpheum Theater for three weeks only, May 20th through June 8th.
0:51.9	Tickets on sale now at Broadwaysf.com.
0:56.7	From KQED.
1:09.9	From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.
1:13.6	Child care costs can eat up to 20% of some families' incomes, and yet the true cost of caring for our children is much higher.
1:21.6	Caregivers, for their part, rarely are paid a living wage, and many providers remain on the edge of viability.
1:28.3	This has become a large drag on the American workforce as people leave their careers
1:32.3	because it's just too expensive to pay for people to take care of young kids.
1:37.3	And in this country's patriarchal system, women's work lives are often the ones that suffer.
1:41.3	I won't surprise you to learn that the pandemic widen the cracks in our patched together system,
1:46.0	nor that other countries do this all better.
1:48.5	We'll talk about our broken caregiving system and how we might fix it.
1:51.9	That's all coming up next after this news.
2:18.8	Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. There's some brutal math to child care here in America. What to take to live in our region. There are different ways to calculate a living wage, but let's call it roughly $30 an hour in the Bay Area. To hire someone at that wage, it cost you more than $60,000 a year,
2:25.2	and still that caregiver would not be making out. Of course, most people put their kids into care situations that are not one-to-one, yet they still pay more than $1,000 a month, and caregivers still
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