The Parents Aren’t All Right

The parents of newly admitted Harvard students have more than one reason to cheer. The Financial Aid Office claims that for 90 percent of American families, it would be the same or cheaper to attend Harvard than a state school. And for the median household, which has an income of about $51,000, the expected family contribution would likely be zero dollars.

So what’s more expensive than a state school—or Harvard, accounting for financial aid? Apparently, child care, according to the Child Care Aware 2013 study. In more than thirty states, the average cost of center-based infant care is greater than the price of tuition and fees at a public university. In all fifty states, child care costs more than 25 percent of the median income of single parents.

Expenses are particularly high in Massachusetts, where the average annual cost for out-of-home infant care was $16,430. Even though older children are slightly cheaper to care for, the cost doesn’t fall by much—the average expense for out-of-home care for a four-year-old represents 44 percent of the income of the average Massachusetts single mother.

Families that earn below the federal poverty line ($23,850 for a family of four this year) are generally eligible for vouchers that partially subsidize care. However, it’s estimated that only one in six children eligible for childcare subsidies actually receive them, in part due to the waiting lists that exist in almost half of US states, including Massachusetts. In the Boston area, the wait time to receive a voucher is up to three years.

One of the women currently on this waiting list is Nicky, a woman I interviewed for this piece.  Nicky did not want her full name included in the article because she did not want her social security status to be publicized.  Nicky initially had a voucher, which allowed her to get care for her daughter, who is disabled. She was receiving about $250 monthly from Supplemental Security Income, but this was contingent on her working limited hours, and Nicky can’t afford not to work for a check of $250. Nicky also has a son who lives with her and takes care of her own mother, who has heart problems.

Nicky’s voucher was canceled because she was unsure how to accurately report her income, which is volatile, a common situation for those who work in low-wage, high- turnover jobs. And now, her daughter has to go to the back of the line. Without the voucher, Nicky can’t find high-quality childcare at levels that she can afford. This means that her daughter won’t get the specialized attention that she needs, and Nicky will have to turn down job offers because her daughter comes first.

There are millions of families stuck in the same trap; if they try to invest in their child’s future by giving them a leg up on educational achievement, they’ll wreck their own financial security and fall deeper into poverty. Perhaps that’s one of the contributing factors to the class distribution of Harvard students—after all, only a fifth of our students come from families in the bottom 60 percent of the income distribution.

By now, there is robust evidence indicating that high quality, full-day early education programs can produce educational gains that are sustained for years, even when those same children are thrown into subpar education systems. It’s one of the reasons that Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York fought for funding to allow every child in the city universal access to pre-K, funded by a small tax on one-percenters, “less than three bucks a day—about the cost of a small soy latte at your local Starbucks,” in his own words. (While this dedicated tax didn’t pass, the state government found the money for pre-K elsewhere.)

If programs like this were expanded nationwide, the access would not only benefit the toddlers, but their parents too. While the kids are playing with blocks and reading books at school, their mothers and fathers can find work, advance their own education, or move out of the graveyard shift and into a position that offers career growth opportunities.

It’s important to restart the national conversation around enlarging Head Start and Early Head Start to every willing child in America. Congress also needs to reauthorize and increase the size of the Child Care and Development block grant, which funds most of these vouchers. But waiting for Washington to act would ensnare all of American in the same paralysis that has frozen the Beltway. Local policymakers who believe in the children of their cities and states, and think they have the potential to be the leaders, thinkers, and doers of the next generation, need to put down their soy lattes and start buying children’s books. If giving up coffee today allows us to wake up to a better tomorrow, the choice is clear.

Faheem Zaman ’16 is a social studies and applied mathematics concentrator in Pforzheimer House. His column usually appears on alternate Wednesdays.