Working Families

Access to affordable, reliable, and high-quality early learning and child care opportunities provides working families with better job stability and overall economic security.

Here are five things to know about child care and working families.

1. Child care prices are untenable across all program types, age groups, and geographic locations. In 2021, the cost of infant care ranged from 24.6% to 75.1% of income for single-parent households.
2. Child care helps parents return to or stay at work, which can generate an additional $94,000 in lifetime earnings for mothers.
3. Almost half of parents are absent from work at least once every six months due to child care issues.
4. 74% of mothers and 66% of fathers have left work early, arrived late, or been absent because child care fell through at the last minute.
5. In a recent poll, 59% of part-time or non-working parents say they would go back to work full-time if their child had access to quality child care at a reasonable cost.

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