Member-only story
Parents Pay an Average of 88% of Their Income on Childcare
Why “paying for the village” to raise our children leaves us broke.
I recently ran across this article from CNN that talked about how childcare was horrifically expensive and many people aren’t having kids or more than one kid because they can’t afford it, along with spouses (mostly women) not working to provide childcare at home.
This tracked with what I expected, as afew years ago, I wrote about how my wife and I would end up spending $65,000 on childcare for our son.
The article had a chart that showed how much childcare costs had risen from 2022 to 2023.
It’s a cute little graphic, but it doesn’t really tell the whole story. It’s only a one-year price comparison, and we all know childcare wasn’t getting cheaper before 2022 or even before the pandemic started in 2020.
But just how bad has it been the past 10 years?
Fortunately, Care.com has been putting out their Cost of Childcare report since 2014, so I could get some good data from the same source for the past decade.
