Every year, the Kids Count Data Book presents national and state data on four categories: economic well-being, education, health and family, and community. The publication also ranks states in overall child well-being. This year, for the first time, the foundation investigated the state of child care in the U.S. and what they found is the system is broken. Safe, reliable care, the report says, is inaccessible and unaffordable for too many Americans.
Martin Muñoz is the Kids Counts director for the nonprofit Utah Voices for Children. He says the study looked at the cost of child care for both a family and a single mother.
“A two-income family will see the cost of child care roughly being 9% of their of their income,” Muñoz said. “But a single mother is seeing child care costs, at a child care center, taking about 24% of their income.”
The result, he says, is the employment of some 13% of families in Utah was affected by child care problems.
“They were seeing issues of having to be late to work, having to change jobs completely, or having to call in sick, running into issues of just their work was affected, or they refused new employment because of child care,” he said.
The report also found that the high costs of child care aren’t going to caregiver salaries. The report highlights those providing child care are grossly underpaid. In fact, the report noted that caregivers are paid worse than 98% of other professions, leading to chronic workforce shortages and high turnover.
“Child care workers, they were only nationally averaging around $13 an hour in wages and compared to where retail or customer service work you know, they can switch jobs and make anywhere from $1 to $5 more an hour,” he said. “So that really does affect them, which then affects our child care centers’ ability to find employees, they're competing with wages that are much higher and more enticing to leave the area.”
With COVID-19 relief funds ending this year, Muñoz says it’s a crisis in the making for our country and not just for the families, but businesses that depend on their employees to show up for work. Just recently the Salt Lake Chamber, United Way and Voices for Utah Children released a report showing the impacts to a loss of worker income and state tax revenues.
“They even found that in Utah access to child care was an estimated $1.36 billion loss of annual Utah income, and Utah lost an estimated $258 million annual in tax revenue due to childcare issues,” he said. “So, it's affecting our society, it's affecting the well-being of families, it's going to be a very concerning crisis coming down the road, that we need to have leadership, that's going to step up and say, we need to do something, we need to help families.”
The report, however, did have some good news: Utah is making gains in its overall child well-being. In 2019, Utah ranked 7th in the country. Last year the state ranked 4th and this year, Utah found itself in 2nd place.
