Child care is costly everywhere. But in Massachusetts, it’s ‘particularly bad.’ Here’s why - Boston Globe
By Amanda Kaufman
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the already dire child-care crisis in the United States, forcing families to scramble to find care among fewer available slots. But after securing a spot comes another layer that’s particularly excruciating for families in Massachusetts: affording it.
While these issues aren’t unique to Massachusetts — families across the country are struggling to secure and pay for child care, and day-care centers are facing staff shortages — the costs in the state are among the highest in the country. Infant care in Massachusetts is easily more expensive than in-state tuition at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is about 30 percent more than average rent in the state, according to one estimate.
“Overall, the market for child care is completely broken, and it’s completely not working at a national level, but it looks particularly bad in Massachusetts,” said Colin Jones, a senior policy analyst at the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center.
Among the issues is a shortage in supply, driven in part by a lack of workers, echoing a labor shortage currently felt across a variety of industries.
About 108,000 child-care workers have left the industry since the start of the pandemic, according to an analysis by the University of California Berkley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. Nationally, child-care jobs are 90 percent of what they were at the start of the pandemic; it’s even more severe in Massachusetts, which now has 63 percent of pre-pandemic child-care job levels. These jobs are predominantly filled by women, many of whom are women of color.
“We can’t find teachers to be in classrooms, and if we don’t have teachers in classrooms, we cannot enroll kids,” said Lauren Birchfield Kennedy, cofounder of Neighborhood Villages, an organization that advocates for child-care reform. “And as a result, we’re seeing many programs need to close the entire classrooms or in some circumstances even close entire locations.”