tarnThe last several weeks have been a bit of a doozy. A child care doozy.
We didn’t have child care for my small children for a couple of weeks between their summer programs ending and school starting. When we realized that we, as two full-time workers with demanding jobs, would be without child care, the stress levels started rising and the scrambling commenced.
We thought about different options, including trying to find a short-term babysitter. Ultimately, my partner decided to burn through a week of vacation days to take the kids on an end-of-summer road trip with grandma. I stayed home and worked. It wasn’t ideal, but it was a fix.
And now that school has started, the kids have two weeks of phase-in, where they only go to school a couple of hours each day. That means more stress, juggling work duties with dropping kids off and picking them up. On Monday, it was my turn to use a vacation day to take my toddler to school.
So the “Sound of Ideas” on Tuesday was perfectly timed. We talked about all the difficulties parents face juggling work and child care and I realized pretty quickly that we were talking about a whole lot of people, including me.
I also realized how lucky my partner and I are to have resources and options, empathetic bosses and a certain amount of schedule flexibility. Parents who can’t leave work, who work odd hours or who just don’t make enough to cover the cost of child care are like superheroes to me.
Child care is a huge issue for nearly every parent and it’s not something they warn you about when you’re thinking about parenthood. Sick days for your kids, or for yourself to care for your kids, are super stressful – again, if you are lucky enough to have a job and have PTO to burn. Getting into a child care program is difficult and expensive, as is the cost of a private sitter. Even if you can afford it, finding someone trustworthy who can work the hours you need is so hard.
We talked about this in a show planning meeting last week and our new associate producer Aya Cathey produced Tuesday’s show, assembling a group of experts that included child care providers and a parent who was forced to leave the workforce to care for her kids because child care became too big of an obstacle during the pandemic.
What we found in our research is that the average annual cost of an infant's child care in Ohio is almost $10,000 a year. And even if you can pay for that, there are a lack of available options, especially for parents working nontraditional hours. Since 2020, almost 400 daycares have closed in Ohio due to staffing and funding issues.
A report this year by the Center for Community Solutions in Cleveland found that families with young children in Northeast Ohio are missing out on hundreds of millions of dollars in potential earnings each year.
It was a good conversation, and I felt like I learned a lot, including about steps that can be taken at the state level to treat the child care industry like the important component of our economy that it is.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s past noon and my partner — who took the morning off to be with our kids — is waiting for me to get home.
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