The financial fragility of single parents who need child care – Boston Globe
By Tanzina Vega
It almost cost me $20 an hour to write this opinion piece. As a single mom of a toddler, that’s what I pay for babysitting if I need help on weekends or outside of the weekday hours of day care. And while I was lucky enough to have family help for a few hours, many single parents don’t have that option or the $20 an hour. And when single parents do find child care, the costs, relative to income, can be staggering in comparison to what coupled parents pay.
A recent report by Child Care Aware of America found that the average single parent allots roughly 35 percent of their income to child care compared to married couples, who allot just 10 percent of their income. “If child care is already a wasteland and parents are out on a tightrope, then solo parents are out on a tightrope over the Grand Canyon,” Elliott Haspel, author of “Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It,” told me. “Child care is already unaffordable, but when you have two incomes — or the potential for two incomes — it makes the equation a little more viable,” Haspel said.