Women Most Likely to Leave a Job for Childcare Due to High Costs

Wednesday, April 24th, 2024 -- 11:01 AM

(AP) The dilemma is common in the United States, high-quality child care programs are prohibitively expensive, government assistance is limited, and daycare openings are sometimes hard to find at all.

In 2022, more than 1 in 10 young children had a parent who had to quit, turn down or drastically change a job in the previous year because of child care problems. And that burden falls most on mothers, who shoulder more child-rearing responsibilities and are far more likely to leave a job to care for kids. Even so, women’s participation in the workforce has recovered from the pandemic, reaching historic highs in December 2023.

But that masks a lingering crisis among women who lack a college degree: The gap in employment rates between mothers who have a four-year degree and those who don’t has only grown. For mothers without college degrees, a day without work is often a day without pay. They are less likely to have paid leave.

And when they face an interruption in child care arrangements, an adult in the family is far more likely to take unpaid time off or to be forced to leave a job altogether, according to an analysis of Census survey data by The Associated Press in partnership with the Education Reporting Collaborative. In interviews, mothers across the country shared how the seemingly endless search for child care, and its expense, left them feeling defeated.

It pushed them off career tracks, robbed them of a sense of purpose, and put them in financial distress. Some women challenge the image of the stay-at-home mom as an affluent woman with a high-earning partner, said Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“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,” Calarco said.

Her own research indicates three-quarters of stay-at-home moms live in households with incomes less than $50,000, and half have household incomes of less than $25,000. Still, the high cost of child care has upended the careers of even those with college degrees.

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