Day Care Enrollments Plummet as Families Struggle to Pay the Bills

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 23:13:00 GMT

New Horizons daycare center just outside of Chicago has seen its enrollment cut by 50 percent in the last three months. And a San Gabriel, California daycare saw its enrollment go from 51 kids last year to 15 this year.

As the economy goes from scary to terrifying, parents around the country are being forced to cut back on childcare or pull their kids out of daycare altogether, relying instead on extended family or drastic changes to their own work lives.

"It is not about people making choices to drive a second car," said Diane Stout, who is the executive director of New Horizons. "For many low income people it is making a choice for food." And, with yearly day care costs averaging between $3,380 and $10,787 for childcare for one preschooler, even middle income families are being faced with the need to cut back on childcare.

Providers say they are seeing increased disciplinary problems amongst kids who are stressed by their families’ financial problems and by the loss of many of their friends in daycare.

And many fear that kids will be placed in dangerous situations as their parents’ desperation increases. Even families who qualify for aid often don’t bother applying since the waiting list is so long, being forced instead to put their children in questionable situations while they work to pay the rent and put food on the table. One woman, was instance, was leaving her four-year-old daughter in her car while she worked at a shoe store, checking on her every hour.

As the executive director of Child Care Solutions, a New York referral agency put it, "We are driving people into an unregulated system."

Photo: AP

Is Cutting Your Sitter's Pay the Best Way to Save Money?

Is Child No. 3 a Luxury Good?

Madeline Holler — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:31:00 GMT

If there's one person who has made the child/commerce connection, it's Pamela Paul. She's the author of Parenting, Inc. and Babble contributor with a dispatch this week that, and perhaps I'm speaking only for myself here, reassured those of us parents who never managed to follow through on the baby sign language classes, thereby condemning our children to low IQs and drool.

Well, she's digging in deeper to the idea of kids and cost in a recent Washington Post essay, where she's talking about the status of the third child, particularly for those raising their families in expensive cities. Apparently, Baby No. 3 is something of a luxury good. Or, as some would believe, a completely insane, misguided, poorly thought out idea that she and her husband -- New York City dwellers and parents of two -- will nonetheless be adding to their lives.

Kids these days are expensive (private schools! nannies! 70 new toys a year!) and they take up precious real-estate. So no wonder, she argues, there's the perception that a third (or fourth or sixth) child is an achievement bestowed only on the fabulously wealthy. It's also something people of means are largely doing, rather than the recession-sensitive middle-class. The showoffs!

From washingtonpost.com

It's true that, following in the designer maternity clothes of such fecund celebrities as Posh Spice (three kids) and Angelina Jolie (speculatively six), most of the people going for a third baby are well-heeled moms and their high-salaried husbands. A February analysis of Current Population Survey data by the Council on Contemporary Families found that in the past 10 years, the top-earning 1.3 percent of the population has seen an uptick in families with three or more children. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 12 percent of upper-income women had three children or more in 2002, compared with only 3 percent in 1995.

She also cites that breathtaking stat that each child costs on average $204,060 to house, clothe, educate and entertain until the age of 18. (Jeez, my kids are the ones holding THAT number down ...)

So what do you think? Did you trade in financial security and your Birken bag for a third child? Are large families just for crazy ladies like Angelina and that Mormon mom in the RV?

Image: Celebrityhack.com

Strollerderby : middle class families

Day Care Enrollments Plummet as Families Struggle to Pay the Bills

Is Child No. 3 a Luxury Good?