Child Care Spending Generates Massive Dividends – Center for American Progress
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the child care industry has struggled against the threat of collapse. The cost of child care to families has risen and can now amount to thousands of dollars per month—equal to and sometimes more than the average mortgage payment, more than twice the average car payment, and nearly 17 times the average electrical bill in the United States. Since February 2020, hundreds of thousands of jobs in the child care workforce have also been lost. Furthermore, the pandemic has revealed and exacerbated the deep structural instability that decades of disinvestment in this sector have created.
The price of congressional inaction on the child care and early education systems is too high; children, families, care providers, and the broader economy require bold fiscal intervention. Approximately 20 million children under the age of 6 in the United States require regular child care—a number that is nearly double the population of Arizona.
As the country enters the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, parents, employers, and early education professionals are desperate to see the U.S. Congress pass comprehensive, long-term child care and pre-K legislation. The immediate benefits of such investments are manifold: They can help providers recruit, retain, and train more child care professionals; help working parents—especially mothers and caregivers of color—rejoin the workforce after leaving work or reducing their hours to meet their child care needs; and support the health and well-being of children. Over a longer period, these investments can provide the social and educational support to prepare young children for a more globalized and competitive economy…
This issue brief examines three key domains where early investments in child care would have cascading benefits: 1) family and child health; 2) children’s educational outcomes; and 3) economic growth.