AUBURN, Wash. (NEWSnet/AP) — After a series of lower-paying jobs, Nicole Slemp finally landed one she loved as a secretary in Washington’s child services department.

Slemp expected to return to work after having her son in August. But then she and her husband started looking for child care – and doing the math.

The best option would cost about $2,000 a month, with a long wait list, and even the least expensive option would cost around $1,600, still eating up most of Slemp’s salary. Her husband earns about $35 an hour at a hose distribution company. Between them, they earned too much to qualify for government help.

“I really didn’t want to quit my job,” says Slemp, 33, who lives in a Seattle suburb. But, she says, she felt like she had no choice.

The dilemma is common in the United States, where high-quality child care programs are prohibitively expensive, government assistance is limited, and day care 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.

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.

Women’s participation in the workforce has recovered from the pandemic, reaching historic highs in December 2023. But the gap has grown in employment rates between mothers who have a four-year degree and those who don’t. For mothers without college degrees, a day without work is often a day without pay because they are less likely to have a job that allows paid leave.

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.

Should there be an interruption in child case arrangements, adult in the family is 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.

As a result, women like Slemp break the stereotype 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.

For low- and middle-income women who do find child care, the expense can become overwhelming. The Department of Health and Human Services has defined “affordable” child care as an arrangement that costs no more than 7% of a household budget. But a Labor Department study found fewer than 50 American counties where a family earning the median household income could obtain child care at that “affordable” price.

There’s also a connection between the cost of child care and the number of mothers working: a 10% increase in the median price of child care was associated with a 1% drop in the maternal workforce, the Labor Department found.

Slemp still sometimes wonders how she ended up staying at home with her son – time she cherishes but also finds disorienting. She thought she was doing well. After stints at a water park and a call center, her state job seemed like a step toward financial stability. How could it be so hard to maintain her career, when everything seemed to be going right?

“Our country is doing nothing to try to help fill that gap,” Slemp said. As a parent, “we’re supposed to keep the population going, and they’re not giving us a chance to provide for our kids to be able to do that.”

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