![]() I have written a lot of stories over the years and interviewed women about their career decisions, and I can't tell you the number of women that I have talked to who have chosen a career or dropped out of the workforce or switched to part time solely because they couldn't afford child care. How can you possibly afford a figure like that when you're just starting off professionally? A lot of women who probably can't even afford to work because it's too expensive to have daycare. GROSS: And a lot of women have babies early in their 20s, even teens. I don't think I could have afforded it earlier in my career. rather than she would have probably had to stay until 6:00 or 6:30 had I been going into the office. SUDDATH: It is just under $2,000, and the reason why it is what I would say cheap for Brooklyn is because we have shortened the hours that we have put her in because I'm not commuting to work. GROSS: And how much do you have to pay a month? And we probably would have looked at some more places, but then the world shut down, and I thought, OK, well, of these three places, I'll just go with this one. One I really just didn't like, and it's hard to explain why. ![]() So in February, my husband and I started touring daycares in Brooklyn because we had heard horror stories from friends about incredibly long wait lists and not getting a spot.Īnd I knew how expensive it was because I had heard from friends that it was, you know, sometimes between $2,000 and $3,000 a month here is pretty common. And I like to do a lot of research ahead of time, and we'd actually started our daycare search before we knew about coronavirus. SUDDATH: So she was born in July of 2020 in the depths of the pandemic, which means I was already pregnant when everything shut down originally in March. What were some of the challenges you faced as a new mother finding daycare for your child? GROSS: So you wrote this article about how unaffordable daycare is, in part because your child is now about to be 17 months old, and you had to look for daycare. ![]() She's also been reporting for years on the lack of paid family leave and how that hurts businesses and the American economy in addition to hurting new parents.ĬLAIRE SUDDATH: Thank you so much for having me. She examines why our current daycare and early education system is unaffordable for most daycare providers, as well as for parents, and why attempts to change that through federal funding keeps failing in Congress. She wrote a recent article titled "How Child Care Became The Most Broken Business In America." The subtitle is "Biden Has A Plan To Make Daycare More Affordable For Parents If The Providers Don't Go Out Of Business First." The article is published in Bloomberg Businessweek, where she's a senior writer who often writes about gender equity. If you're wondering why child care is so expensive, almost like paying college tuition for a toddler, my guest, Claire Suddath, can help answer that.
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