Childcare isn’t a family issue: It’s an economic competitiveness issue

The average annual cost of childcare for a child under 6 is $10,600, which comes to just over $200 per week.

That’s for one kid. For two, the cost is more than the average monthly mortgage payments in 44 states and the District of Columbia.

Childcare isn’t just a family issue. It’s an economic competitiveness issue.

“More than 1 million people are right now out of the workforce for the simple reason that they can’t afford high-quality childcare,” said U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, who is partnering with Washington Sen. Patty Murray and Virginia Congressman Bobby Scott on legislation to tackle the childcare problem, styled the Child Care for Working Families Act.

The bill would ensure that the typical family in America would pay no more than $10 a day for child ccare, with many families paying nothing at all, and that no eligible family will pay more than 7 percent of their income on childcare.

It would also mandate that childcare workers would be paid a living wage and achieve parity with elementary school teachers who have similar credentials and experience.

This is the seventh go-round for trying to get Congress to sign on to the effort, which was first introduced in the House and Senate way back in 2017.

Kaine told reporters last week that he senses that there is, finally, growing support in Congress from his colleagues.

“They’re all hearing the same thing I’m hearing. Everybody – red state, blue state, city, suburb, country – is hearing from parents who are having a hard time finding affordable childcare, and as a result, they’re out of the workforce at the very time that every employer is saying, We can’t hire enough people,” Kaine said.

It’s good news, obviously, that the unemployment rate is approaching the 3 percent level nationwide, because that means people are working, but even with the labor-force participation rate ticking up in the months since the end of the COVID pandemic emergency, there are still millions who have not returned to the workforce.

“This unemployment issue is not going to magically go away, and so there have to be strategies that get people into the workforce,” Kaine said. “Affordable childcare isn’t the only thing we need to do. We need to do a work-based immigration reform. We need to help people who are dealing with Long COVID who are out of the workforce get accommodations so they can get back in the workforce. We need to give people better training and skills so they can kind of climb the ladder in terms of the kinds of jobs that they can take. But childcare is a big part of it.”