Child care costs are swallowing their paychecks, and these voters want solutions

Milwaukee: MILWAUKEE — Charlotte Randolph, the owner of a child care center on Milwaukee’s North Side, pinned a button to her chest that reads “I’m a Care Voter.” She laid out a spread of pizza and snacks outside, a draw for mothers and children in the neighborhood who were milling around the yard on a warm recent evening.

In the final days before the presidential election, Randolph said, she was determined to send women into the voting booth with one issue front and center: child care.

“They need quality child care and they need affordable child care,” Randolph said. “It should be on their minds and in their hearts when they go to the polls to vote.”

Child care is an overshadowed issue in presidential politics, dwarfed by talk of inflation, immigration, reproductive rights and foreign policy. But in battlegrounds like Wisconsin this year, concerns about the issue feel acute, and there’s an emerging sense that the candidates for president are no longer ignoring the role that child care can play in the lives of voters, especially women.

In the last major speech of her campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris said Tuesday in Washington that she would work to make raising children more affordable for parents.

“I’ll fight for a child tax credit to save them some money, which will also lift American children out of poverty,” she said. “I will work to lower the cost of child care, which is out of reach for too many working families today.”

Former President Donald Trump said in September at the Economic Club in New York that he would support legislation to make child care more affordable, but offered a rambling explanation afterward that seemed to suggest that increased tariffs might help pay for it.

On the vice presidential debate stage in October, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, said that “a lot of us care about this issue,” suggesting that one path to affordability was to lean on family members and allow the federal government to subsidize the informal care that takes place at home or outside of child care centers.

President Joe Biden has tried to create a national affordable child-care system and extend tax credits for families with children, but congressional Republicans have blocked his efforts.

Whether there are viable plans offered by presidential candidates is another question.

“I don’t see a ton of great ideas,” said Ashley Becker, a mother of two in Grafton, Wisconsin, a town in Ozaukee County near Milwaukee. “I don’t see real solutions.”

As the cost of enrolling children in day care centers has risen, parents have been forced to devote larger portions of their income to child care costs. In some cases, parents have scaled back career ambitions or quit their jobs entirely. Many people have kept their families smaller than they would like, stopping at one or two children because they cannot afford any more.

Providers have also struggled to stay afloat financially, paying their employees enough to compete in a strong job market, but still having difficulty making money, because what parents can afford to pay is not enough to cover their expenses.

The issue is especially pronounced in Wisconsin, where a recent survey showed that at the end of 2023, only half of the spots in the state’s child care centers were affordable for families. The year before, 74% of child care spots were considered affordable, in part because of the end of federal pandemic response funding, some of which had gone to child care centers.

Sparkle Negron, 45, who owns a small day care in Milwaukee, said that she had started offering pickup and drop-off services to families as a way to set her center apart.

“It’s just not fun any more,” she said, referring to running a day care. “Food has gotten more expensive, and all my costs are going up.”

But Negron said she was encouraged by this presidential election and planned to vote for Harris, after hearing her address the issue repeatedly on the campaign trail.

“This is the first time I’ve heard them talking about it,” Negron said. “It really surprised me.”

Melissa Welsh of Kenosha, Wisconsin, who works for a roofing distribution company, said she and her boyfriend were burdened by the high cost of day care for their children.

The teachers at the center are hardworking and should be paid well, Welsh said — “they deserve the world,” she added — but the costs add up to be about 20% of her household income.

“I do think, looking at some of these other governments around the world that we’re supposed to be on the same level with, it’s really obvious that we don’t support moms in the same way,” she said. “It’s really sad that the federal government doesn’t support families.”

Some parents have found solutions through other family members, as Vance has encouraged. Brittany Sabin, a nurse practitioner in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, depends on her mother, Pam, to care for two of her three children.

Sabin intends to vote for Trump because of his position on guns and his tax policy, she said, and she favored the idea of a bigger child tax credit that both Trump and Harris have said they support.

“Something needs to be done,” Sabin said. “It’s just so stressful and mind-boggling.”

Even with a healthy household income of roughly $200,000, she said, it is hard to imagine that she and her husband could expand their family further.

“I always wanted four kids,” Sabin said. “But I can’t afford a fourth child the way I want a fourth child.”