tarnThe last several weeks have been a bit of a doozy. A child care doozy.
We didn鈥檛 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鈥檛 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 鈥淪ound of Ideas鈥� 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鈥檛 leave work, who work odd hours or who just don鈥檛 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鈥檚 not something they warn you about when you鈥檙e thinking about parenthood. Sick days for your kids, or for yourself to care for your kids, are super stressful 鈥� 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鈥檚 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.
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鈥檒l excuse me, it鈥檚 past noon and my partner 鈥� who took the morning off to be with our kids 鈥� is waiting for me to get home.
"The Cut" is featured in 海角破解版's weekly newsletter, The Frequency Week in Review. To get The Frequency Week in Review, The Daily Frequency or any of our newsletters, sign up on鈥�Ideastream's newsletter subscription page.
