Women With Lower Paying Jobs Struggling With Child Care

(AmericanProsperity.com) – Many women are experiencing difficulties when it comes to weighing their options for child care and what would work with their family and finances.

Nicole Slemp is one mom who has been having difficulties when finding childcare options that weren’t so expensive. She went from low-paying job to low-paying job before she found something she liked, but what she had to pay for childcare for her to work almost made it not worth it. She found the lowest options to be about fifteen hundred dollars with the average being about two thousand dollars a month for childcare.

She explained that between the two of them, she and her husband made too much to qualify for any government assistance and they found themselves weighing their options. Slemp felt like she had no choice, saying “I really didn’t want to quit my job.”

This issue is something that has been experienced all across the United States as high-quality childcare options are quite expensive. Not only this, but daycare options are also very hard to find as there are usually waitlists for months.

Statistics say that in 2022 one in ten young children had a parent who had to quit or drastically change their career because of childcare issues. Mothers are more often the parent that has to switch things up or quit to take care of their children.

Also, there is a big difference between women who have a four-year degree and those who don’t as the gap in employment rates continues to grow.

This issue has affected households all over the country as childcare options are limited; if childcare falls through this often means that a parent would need to take time off or even be forced to leave a job altogether.

Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said, “The stay-at-home moms in this country are disproportionately mothers who’ve been pushed out of the workforce because they don’t make enough to make it work financially to pay for child care.” Her research states that three-quarters of stay-at-home moms live in homes with incomes of less than fifty thousand dollars.