Guest Opinion: Child care is not just a women’s issue
When you see the term “child care,” what first comes to mind?
What comes to my mind is it is: 1) necessary, and 2) incredibly expensive.
Numerous studies have shown that children who receive high-quality care in the first five years of life have better outcomes in both socioeconomic status and health as adults. The Iowa Department of Public Health says during children’s first five years of life, their brains develop to 90 percent of their capacity.
When young children do not achieve healthy mental development early in life, they are at risk to do poorly later in school, putting them at increased risk for failure out of school, juvenile delinquency, developing adult mental health problems and other concerns.
Quality and accessible child care comes at a cost. For my husband and myself, roughly a quarter of our combined income goes to pay for child care for our two children under 5 so we can work every day.
To put things into perspective, the tuition for an Iowa resident undergraduate engineering student at Iowa State University is currently $9,080 per year. Last year, we paid over $14,000 for our youngest child’s (under 2) accredited child care center. That does not include the tuition we paid for our oldest child at the same center.
When I tell people it would be cheaper to send my kids to a state university for a year than a child care center, most think I’m joking. I am not.
According to a 2016 report released by Child Care Aware titled “Child Care in America: 2016 State Fact Sheets,” the costs for child care in Iowa for an infant range from an average of $6,944 a year for an in-home provider to an average of $12,860 per year for an accredited center.
You might be thinking, “I don’t have small children, why should I care?”
First, if you are an employer with employees who have children, not caring about child care could cost you both money and time.
A study from Cornell University indicated child care breakdowns cost U.S. businesses approximately $4.4 billion annually in employee absenteeism. Another 2015 report points out that over a six-month period, 45 percent of parents are absent from work at least once, and miss an average of 4.3 days within that six-month period, because of child care breakdowns.
Second, although child care has historically been seen as a woman’s issue, 40 years ago, fewer than half of all mothers worked outside of the home. Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 61 percent of mothers with children under 3 years old work and 75 percent of mothers with children 6 to 17 years old work outside of the home.
Children are our future workforce, and working parents and guardians are part of our current workforce. With the proper help, the children of these parents and guardians will grow up to be doctors, caregivers, engineers, teachers, business people, entrepreneurs, mechanics, welders, writers, artists, and so on.
These children will run our economy eventually. We all have a stake in providing a quality education for our youngest population.
Next time: Corey will discuss how child care workers play a part in this picture.
Kristen Corey leads the Office on the Status of Women at the Iowa Department of Human Rights. This article is her own opinion, and may not represent the opinions of the state of Iowa.
Corey received a master’s degree in sociology and sustainable agriculture from Iowa State University, where she started her career as an academic researcher for Iowa State University Extension and Outreach. She later worked for the Iowa Department of Human Services and then moved to her current position to follow her passion for working with and for women and girls. She and her husband have two small children and are constantly renegotiating roles as working parents.
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