Childcare Costs Quotes

A reporter once asked me why I think progressive men who earn significantly less than their breadwinning wives still won't quit their jobs to take care of their children. Why do they still hold on to their careers, even if taking care of the children would make more financial sense because the cost of childcare is higher than their net salary? I think I know the answer to that now, and it sucks. Women are not expected to live a life for themselves. When women dedicate their lives to children, it is deemed a worthy and respectable choice. When women dedicate themselves to a passion outside of the family that doesn't involve worshiping their husbands or taking care of their kids, they're seen as selfish, cold, or unfit mothers. But when a man spends hours grueling over a craft, profession, or project, he's admired and seen as a genius. And when a man finds a woman who worships him, who dedicates her life to serving him, he's lucky. But when a man dedicates himself to taking care of his children it's seen as a last resort. That it must be because he ran out of other options. That it's plan Z. That it's an indicator of his inability to provide for his family. Basically, that he's a fucking loser. I think it's one of the most important falsehoods we need to shatter when talking about women's rights.

My clinical practice is focused on people who identify as women, many of whom have children but not all. In a country without mandatory paid family leave and with astronomical childcare costs, parenthood can be an existential tipping point for women. But it is important to note that it’s not just mothers who suffer from this overburdening—it’s anyone who has been conditioned to put the needs and preferences of others ahead of themselves.

childcare costs a fortune and she can’t get benefits as she’s working more than sixteen hours a week yet she’s on minimum wage. She can’t get any more hours at work, so she’s having to do this a few nights a week to pay bills and childcare.

What does it mean to shift our ideas of access and care (whether it’s disability, childcare, economic access, or many more) from an individual chore, an unfortunate cost of having an unfortunate body, to a collective responsibility that’s maybe even deeply joyful?

At first she did nothing, waiting for her husband to wake, which he did not, because that wasn’t a thing he ever did. She waited longer than she usually did, waited and waited, the boy wailing while she lay as still as a corpse, patiently waiting for the day when her corpse self would miraculously be reanimated and taken into the Kingdom of the Chosen, where it would create an astonishing art installation composed of many aesthetically interesting beds. The corpse would have unlimited child-care and be able to hang out and go to show openings and drink corpse wine with the other corpses whenever it wanted, because that was heaven. That was it. She lay there as long as she could without making a sound, a movement. Her child’s screams fanned a flame of rage that flickered in her chest. That single, white-hot light at the center of the darkness of herself—that was the point of origin from which she birthed something new, from which all women do. You light a fire early in your girlhood. You stoke it and tend it. You protect it at all costs. You don’t let it rage into a mountain of light, because that’s not becoming of a girl. You keep it secret. You let it burn. You look into the eyes of other girls and see their fires flickering there, offer conspiratorial nods, never speak aloud of a near-unbearable heat, a growing conflagration. You tend the flame because if you don’t you’re stuck, in the cold, on your own, doomed to seasonal layers, doomed to practicality, doomed to this is just the way things are, doomed to settling and understanding and reasoning and agreeing and seeing it another way and seeing it his way and seeing it from all the other ways but your own. And upon hearing the boy’s scream, the particular pitch and slice, she saw the flame behind her closed eyes. For a moment, it quivered on unseen air, then, at once, lengthened and thinned, paused, and dropped with a whump into her chest, then deeper into her belly, setting her aflame

There’s also the impending body horror, the medical racism, and the mortality rate for Black women specifically to think about. If she even survived pregnancy and delivery, she’d then have to deal with the costs of healthcare and childcare, the ramifications of raising a Black kid in a world that would never treat them fairly, never value their life.

The best available apples-to-apples comparison of inflation-adjusted earnings shows what the typical fully employed man earned back in the 1970s and what that same fully employed man earns today. The picture isn’t pretty. As the GDP has doubled and almost doubled again, as corporations have piled up record profits, as the country has gotten wealthier, and as the number of billionaires has exploded, the average man working full-time today earns about what the average man earned back in 1970. Nearly half a century has gone by, and the guy right in the middle of the pack is making about what his granddad did. The second punch that’s landed on families is expenses. If costs had stayed the same over the past few decades, families would be okay—or, at least, they would be in about the same position as they were thirty-five years ago. Not advancing but not falling behind, either. But that didn’t happen. Total costs are up, way up. True, families have cut back on some kinds of expenses. Today, the average family spends less on food (including eating out), less on clothing, less on appliances, and less on furniture than a comparable family did back in 1971. In other words, families have been pretty careful about their day-to-day spending, but it hasn’t saved them. The problem is that the other expenses—the big, fixed expenses—have shot through the roof and blown apart the family budget. Adjusted for inflation, families today spend more on transportation, more on housing, and more on health insurance. And for all those families with small children and no one at home during the day, the cost of childcare has doubled, doubled again, and doubled once more. Families have pinched pennies on groceries and clothing, but these big, recurring expenses have blown them right over a financial cliff.

According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 60.9 percent of all Black families are headed by a single mother who is the breadwinner for the family. Another 20 percent of Black households rely on a married mother as the breadwinner. In every state in the United States, there are more single than married Black mothers. In every state in the United States there are more married white mothers than single ones. In twenty-four states, the cost of childcare exceeds the cost of rent, and in many states the cost of childcare exceeds the 10 percent income-affordability threshold established by federal agencies.

Interactions with the world program our physiological and psychological development. Emotional contact is as important as physical contact. The two are quite analogous, as we recognize when we speak of the emotional experience of feeling touched. Our sensory organs and brains provide the interface through which relationships shape our evolution from infancy to adulthood. Social-emotional interactions decisively influence the development of the human brain. From the moment of birth, they regulate the tone, activity and development of the psychoneuroimmunoendocrine (PNI) super-system. Our characteristic modes of handling psychic and physical stress are set in our earliest years. Neuroscientists at Harvard University studied the cortisol levels of orphans who were raised in the dreadfully neglected child-care institutions established in Romania during the Ceausescu regime. In these facilities the caregiver/child ratio was one to twenty. Except for the rudiments of care, the children were seldom physically picked up or touched. They displayed the self-hugging motions and depressed demeanour typical of abandoned young, human or primate. On saliva tests, their cortisol levels were abnormal, indicating that their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axes were already impaired. As we have seen, disruptions of the HPA axis have been noted in autoimmune disease, cancer and other conditions. It is intuitively easy to understand why abuse, trauma or extreme neglect in childhood would have negative consequences. But why do many people develop stress-related illness without having been abused or traumatized? These persons suffer not because something negative was inflicted on them but because something positive was withheld.

Equal opportunity is possible only if everyone can access childcare centers, good schools, and safe neighborhoods—all of which serve as engines of social mobility. But private opulence and public squalor leads to “the commodification of opportunity,” where those engines of social mobility now cost something. The best way to ensure that opportunity is unequal and unfair is to charge for it.[17]

If a woman can be the attorney general or the secretary of state, what’s keeping you from climbing up the career ladder? You want to complain about the glass ceiling, the lack of childcare, or your boss’s assumption that you don’t deserve a promotion because women don’t perform well under pressure? People in our postfeminist world don’t want to hear about it. They want you to find a way around the impediment. Whining about obstacles won’t solve anything, so get over it. Adjust your attitude. You’re not one of those uptight feminists, are you? Don’t you know that gender equality has been accomplished? Haven’t you heard that feminists keep women down by making them insecure about their ability to compete as men’s equals? They are a defeatist bunch, complaining about minor issues. Surely you won’t let trivial hindrances conquer you! Surely you’ll find a way to make something of yourself. Surely you’ll beat the odds.

Traditional roles were all well and good when everyone agreed and could actually stick to them, but unfortunately, late-stage capitalism and the cost-of-living crisis made it impossible. Women stepped up because men weren’t making enough money to take care of their families anymore. One income wasn’t enough; the wife had to go out to work, too. Trouble came when women stepped up… but their husbands didn’t. That was the root of the problem, now. It was why so many women were tired and defeated and were giving up on having meaningful relationships with men. And it was the reason why so many men were so angry. They considered unpaid domestic labor as exclusively women’s work, and they refused to do it. They didn’t pick up the slack at home. Women found they were doing everything—working, taking care of the household and the childcare and all the mental labor that came with it—and eventually, they started looking at their husbands, and they realized he was just another child they had to take care of. A lot of men still didn’t accept the fact that if they wanted to have traditional wives, they actually had to be traditional husbands. If you didn’t provide or protect, then you were just some jerk who wanted a slave to do his unpaid labor and relieve his blue balls.

Why is divorce so normal in Denmark?’ ‘I think that so many women are working and so many children are taken care of outside the home that it’s very easy to get a divorce and good financial help from the state,’ she says. Because both sexes get paid a decent wage in Denmark, women don’t need to depend on their husbands for money. Most mothers return to work after having a baby and the state pays three-quarters of the costs of childcare – so there’s no financial obligation to stay together if it isn’t working out.

In a nation without an adequate or affordable childcare system, no universal healthcare, expensive to prohibitive costs for higher education and a minimum wage that is not a living wage, there are no registries for the officials and employers who routinely implement policies that actively damage all people, including or even particularly children.

Many of those people actually work, but are still below the federal poverty line. Meanwhile, health care costs are going up, child-care costs are going up, college costs are going up, and housing costs are going up. But wages are not. Low-income workers need a significant boost in what they earn if they are going to live in dignity in today's economy.

Plan ahead start thinking about childcare options and cost as far in advance as you can-FREE MONEY FOR DAYCARE, Author V J SMITH BARNES AND NOBLE NOOK BOOK

Somewhere a scholar is preparing a manuscript on the poetry of Lucille Clifton while his child happily plays under the watch of a childcare provider, the cost of whose labor is paid without worry but the cost of whose living is a source of ongoing anxiety. Somewhere a Frantz Fanon scholar is spending grant money on addressing the built-in obsolescence of their laptop, the rare earth in the guts of which have been plundered from the ground in the new scramble for Africa; the toxic skeletal remains of which will be shipped away out of sight, out of mind, to be dismantled by dispossessed, non-white hands in sacrifice zones for digital capitalism. Somewhere a theorist of settler colonial economic formations is falling asleep on the train en route to a precarious adjunct gig an hour and a half from home, the text of the conference proposal in their lap blurring like the landscape outside, their eyelids heavy from last night's shift at the cafe at which the hourly pay is more or less equivalent to that which they receive for teaching. Somewhere a mid-career scholar is arriving on campus for office hours more relaxed than they have been in years, buoyed by a mixture of validation and excitement after having read an article on white supremacy in classrooms led by non-white faculty, text on page relaxing muscles, jaw, and gut, thinning the dense cloud of alienation in a department in which indicate phrases like "playing the race card" and "all lives matter" are replaced with more professional ones--like "you may be overreacting" and "try to adopt a student-centered approach." Scholarship, no matter how abstract its subject matter, is always already a material practice, a lived experience with complex, far-reaching physical entanglements.

One overlooked aspect of the matriarchal image is the relationship with other matriarchs or mothers who are the heads of households. Mother-to-mother dependence is another element of African American motherhood. Whereas these women work hard for the money outside of the home, they also lean on each other to share childcare responsibilities. The concept of “other mothering” is a component in the African American maternal tradition. Women taking care of each other’s children helped to establish a form of extended family. If formal childcare is not available or too costly, one mother substitutes for another. Other mothering means that the level of respect and honor a child gives to her or his biological mother is due the neighbor, cousin, aunt, or family friend taking care of the child. In the same vein, this secondary mother has the right to discipline the “son” or “daughter” as she would her own. Such reciprocity promotes a sense of communal responsibility that cross-connects mothers and children. If a child misbehaves, it is not unusual to suffer the wrath of both a community and a biological mother. Although this level of motherly accountability may not be as prevalent today, in some communities African American women still depend on each other to pick up children before and after school, carpool to a practice or game, provide a meal here and there, and just serve as an additional family member and supporter.

In the current economy, for most students, colleges couldn’t possibly deliver on providing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of anything. Wages aren’t budging, even though corporate profits have soared. The average CEO now makes 271 times the salary of the average American worker, whereas in 1965, the ratio was twenty-to-one. Healthcare costs are staggering—per capita health spending has increased twenty-nine times over the past four decades—and childcare costs are rising like college tuition, even as the frontline workers in both healthcare and childcare often receive poverty wages. A college degree is no guarantee of financial stability.

In almost half the states in this country, the cost to send a four-year-old to day care exceeds 10 percent of the median income for a two-parent family. In 2011, the average annual cost for an infant to attend a center-based child-care program cost more than a year’s tuition and fees at public universities in thirty-five states.