Here's a remarkable headline from NBC News:
These claims are repeated in the text, so it isn't just a matter of the headline being imprecise in order to save space. And all of them are wrong:
- Inflation has nothing to do with this. The cost of childcare has grown less than overall CPI and less than average wages.
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- It's not "American families." It's families with kids under 13 who use childcare. This is something on the order of 5-10% of all American families.
- The median family income in 2022 was $93,000. This makes childcare about 10% of the median income, not one-fifth.
How about the average monthly cost of childcare, which the Fed puts at $800. Has that gone up over the past few years? The Fed didn't track this in previous reports, but BEA data suggests probably not. There's no crisis and no chaos here.
In general, that is. NBC naturally found a family who says their spending on summer child care has more than doubled since last year. It's probably true! But it's also wildly unrepresentative of the overall situation.
We all know the old saying, "If it bleeds, it leads." News organizations have always focused on the sensational and the horrible, which is why we get so many stories like this one. Even in sober financial spaces, reporters insist on grasping for eyeballs with sensational claims that scare the hell out of people. The problem is that most of them aren't true. As with so many other things in America, childcare in general is about the same as it's always been.
color me confused
The chart says SUMMER CAMPS
Thats a what? 60 80 day FULL time daycare situation?
ON TOP of the usual infant and very young child (pre-school) who need care
The two worker household has made daycare a necessity for working PARENTS.
School for younger students takes care of the daycare problem except for a few hours per day between the time school lets out and Mom and Dad get outta work
But the headline graphic says summer.........Or, am I confused?
The people in the article are lucky. Here in the DC-BOS corridor, a 10-week camp runs $4000-$5000 per child, plus $10/hr/child if you need extended care, which you probably do unless you can stagger hours with your spouse.
You can find a slot for your child?
/s
'complete chaos?'
i look out on my street and oddly enough i don't see burning cars or bullet-riddled corpses
We pay 860 a month. We make far FAR less than the median income. Zip it childless cat gentleman.
younger people tend to have young kids, and people make less when they're young, so their income is most likely below the national median
maybe the childless cat gentleman didn't think this one through very thoroughly
I live in a state with high daycare costs. Monthly costs for an infant back in 2009 were $1400 a month. Same kid is doing a day camp for two weeks this summer as a teenager: $475 a week. Now that is a special treat, not a necessity like it was when he was an infant, but many other kids in the program are young enough that daily care is still a requirement for them. Childcare isn't cheap at all, although it may not be rising much faster than inflation in recent years. It was high long before inflation ramped up.
And yes, daycare costs often hit when your income is lower. That first year of infant care is even more difficult, thanks to the weeks of lost income during maternity leave. It was an exciting day when daycare cost us less each month than our mortgage - for five years it was by far our biggest expense.
Child-free man living comfortable life for decades in one of the country's most affluent areas doesn't understand the economics of having a child in contemporary society.
Shocker. I don't even have kids (yet?), but we've done the research and even on our comfortably affluent salaries (150% of the household median for our county which is the 5th-highest in the country), child care would be such a hit to our budget that it would require downgrading our lifestyle. Not just eating up our current level of savings (~20% of take-home), but surpassing it. It's an enormous factor and if we only earned the median it would be catastrophic. The typical costs of child care alone would account for about 20% of *gross* pay at the median income for our county. That's closer to 30% of net pay. That's a LOT.
I don't expect a childless man in his 60s to understand this, but I also expect him not to sermonize about shit he doesn't understand.
Kevin has been on a roll of late. SIGH. He swung and missed on this one - the point of the article is that THOSE WHO NEED CHILDCARE HAVE TO SPEND WAY TO MUCH $$$ ON IT. Yeah I don't have kids, allergic to cats but our society will devolve if we make it really hard for normal non-weird couples to have kids.
Overall, not a crisis--or no more a crisis than it has been.
But...
People having kids tend to be near the start of their careers, so make below the median income (for the most part). Their parents can help, if the couple lives close to them, but they probably are still working too. Therefore, summer day camps, summer camps, etc., needed for, well, the entire summer--not just for two weeks or month. I'm guessing the good camps in cheaper parts of the country now cater to the wealthier parts of the country and charge more.
Raising kids is very expensive. Just like owning a home costs a lot. Both tend to shock new home owners and parents. And I'd guess that property taxes, a large portion of which goes to fund public schools, do not factor into that $800/month to raise a child.
I still like the $500/month refundable child tax credit for everyone.
Well, damn! If wimminz just stayed home with the kids, they wouldn't need this. Also, every church I know has free Vacation Bible School.
OK, but seriously, I'm an old postmenopausal parent of one, who is a young adult with a summer job, and me and my spouse make lots of money. However, we were once young and made about a quarter of what we make now and I can tell you, not only was daycare a huge part of our monthly expenses, but the summer stuff that you need once your kid starts school and is no longer in year-round daycare are crazy expensive. Bak in the early 2010s, we used to string together various experiences that cost $1200-2500 per week, and filled in with YMCA camp, which was much less expensive (a few hundred/week) but was mostly running around playing tag and swimming. Honestly our kid was mostly happy doing that as long as there were a few experiences at Museum Camp, Zoo Camp, Electronic Music Camp (seriously...), and sports camp. When the kid was older and could go to sleep away camp for a few weeks, it got more expensive but by that time she could stay home alone when she wasn't in New Hampshire doing pottery and kyaking and drama and mountain biking.
Yeah I know this sounds really privileged (and we are), and while the more expensive camps we chose were a luxury, 10 weeks of summer care were a necessity. Still, though, I wonder if the article that quotes $2000 camps is talking to people in a major metropolitan area and includes stuff like coding, electronic music, and screenplay writing.
I can tell you, as the boss of a small administrative unit staffed with primarily women, my younger staff members are dealing not only with daycare costs, which keep increasing, but also with availability which keeps shrinking. Again I am dealing with educated people with decent salaries for their carer stages, but I don't anyone is saving money at this stage.
On the plus side, we live in an area where daycare is expensive in part because the providers are well trained and decently compensated.
Kevin is correct in stating that there isn't a "crisis". As in something new.
He's not arguing that childcare isn't large burden to those lower on the income scale. This has been the case for at least the last 25 years (when I had three kids to juggle).
Childcare costs are a systemic issue and not a temp crisis.
Trump and Vance have that epic synergy of baboon and numbskull where you can feel the practiced inevitably of it coming together like a pie and a face.
So we can enjoy the great professionalism of their failure. They've worked toward this moment their whole lives.
While Kevin likes to remind us that only brand new problems can be considered major problems, this argument never makes any sense.
Covering long-standing problems as a crisis is not sensationalism.
this is oklahoma milk lady redux.
This article from the Census paints a very different picture than Kevin. Perhaps the crazies at the census bureau are just being sensationalist.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/01/rising-child-care-cost.html
I'm not sure.....but is Kevin using the 'per kid' cost of childcare and assuming this is the 'per family' cost? Then also assuming that families with young children make the median family income?
Seems that these assumptions are obviously bad ones.....
Just sitting here imagining Kevin blogging in 1860 that slavery isn’t a crisis, we’ve had it for centuries!
It's not the stories, it's the headlines! You have to draw attention to get clicks and said headlines are written in the most dramatic (if overreactive) way possible
Kevin is being pretty dense here. Summer camp out here in the east coast is $500/week/child, and that's only from 9am-3pm. Add in another $10/hr/kid if you need longer. Two kids implies you need a ~$75k/year job just to pay for child care.
Here's my life. I earn ~$150k now and my wife adds some beer money to that:
Pre-kids (~$100k salary): I could buy anything I wanted within reason, could vacation at normal vacation spots to the extent I had PTO, was filling my 401k and HSA, and still had ~$1000 or so a month left over to save. And of course, I had nothing but free time outside of the 50 or so hours a week dedicated to work and commute.
Post-kids: I budget myself $100/month for "personal" expenses, which mostly consist of clothes from goodwill, gifts and allowances for the kids, and if I am lucky $25/month for stuff I actually want for myself. Vacation budget is entirely dependent on my bonus, which first has to deal with emergencies, which always happen. I do still fill my 401k, but the HSA is now empty and only filled ad-hoc outside my employer's contribution, and we are bleeding a couple hundred bucks a month rather than saving like we were. And, of course, I have an uncompensated "second job" that lasts from 6:30-7:30am and 5:-9:30pm weekdays and from 7:00am-9:30pm weekends and holidays, with no days off. Ever. For approximately 25 years.
It's obvious why the birthrate is falling into the abyss: We simply do not support parents enough. The tax credit for our first child didn't even cover the extra cost of health insurance at work. My paycheck went *down* after having the baby!
At one point I realized that our household income had doubled, but our lifestyle was still the same. How could that be? Then I remembered that we had 2 kids during that time. Maybe we'll get to live a posher life once the kids finish college.
We still have to get good paid parental leave, and have it apply to everyone, including hourly workers. Bring back the $500/month refundable child tax credit on top of current deductions. Not enough, but a start.
Don't forget, with kids, you'll need bigger place to live. That may or may not be more expensive.