Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has frequently talked about the barriers facing working parents, and child care is a big one. “In lots of states it costs more to provide child care for infants and babies and toddlers than it does to pay tuition to go to college,” she said at a campaign event in December. “For most working parents, that is just absolutely beyond reach…. We have to help do a better job supporting families.”
On Tuesday, she’ll get a lot more specific about how she would actually help them. At an event focused on child care, Clinton will pledge that if she were president, under her administration the government would ensure that no family pays more than 10 percent of its income on child care. The promise would extend to all families of all income levels — not just low-income ones but middle-class ones as well — and would involve “substantial” federal spending mixed with new tax breaks. Her campaign has yet to offer details about exactly how it would cap expenses or how much it would cost the government.
Child care can be incredibly expensive. Costs can reach as much as $17,000 a year for an infant and nearly $13,000 a year for a four-year-old. In all but 12 states, the cost eats up more than 10 percent of the median income for a married couple.
It costs more to send two children to a child care center than it does to pay median rent in every state and more than housing costs for homeowners in 24 and Washington, D.C. In 28 states and D.C., it costs more to pay for an infant’s child care than to pay for public college tuition.
These costs have also been rising quickly. Over the last quarter century, average weekly child care expenses for families with working mothers increased more than 70 percent.
Low-income families can sometimes avail themselves of government support through subsidies or Head Start slots. But spending on child care subsidies is at a 12-year low, while the number of children reached by the subsidies is at the lowest level in 16 years. Middle-class families, meanwhile, usually don’t have much assistance beyond the child tax credit that allows them to get between 20 and 35 percent back on up to $3,000 in child care expenses a year.
While Clinton hasn’t yet put forward many details, her call to cap costs is one of the more dramatic proposals out there. Both she and President Obama have called for universal preschool, which would give parents an affordable place to leave their children ages three and up. At younger ages, Obama has proposed increasing the child tax credit, but not nearly enough to make a serious dent in the sky-high costs.
On the other side of the aisle, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has offered little, if anything, for working parents. He’s suggested one solution for the crisis of unaffordable child care: getting more businesses to offer it on site, which just 7 percent of employers already do. He’s also in the past suggested that caring for children is work only women should do and that men who chip in are “act like the wife.”
Clinton will also put forward a plan on Tuesday to deal with the other side of the equation: pay for child care providers. Median wages for child care workers are just $10.31 across the country, nearly a quarter less than what they could make in other jobs, and nearly 15 percent live in poverty. To address that issue, she will look at increasing pay for workers through what she’s calling the Respect And Increased Salaries for Early Childhood Educators, or RAISE initiative, based on pilot programs in several states in order to improve retention and providers’ qualifications.
The most detailed part of her plan so far is slightly different: she will propose doubling federal funding for the “home visiting” program, formally known as the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting Initiative, in which nurses or social workers visit low-income parents in their homes during pregnancy and a child’s infancy. Research has found that the program reduces the frequency of child abuse and neglect, prenatal smoking among mothers, and it improves cognitive outcomes for children.