AMELIA KUNHARDT/The Patriot Ledger

Providers like Jack ’N Jill Child Care face the dilemma of keeping costs down while trying to keep quality teachers. At the Quincy facility, teacher Jenny Fischer leads toddlers in singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider.”

By JULIE JETTE
The Patriot Ledger

As a working mother, Eileen Lefsky’s first challenge in juggling work and parenthood was to find day care for her two children. Her second: Find out how to pay for it.

“I could have a vacation home (instead),” joked the South Weymouth resident, a physical therapist. “It’s like a second mortgage payment every month.”

MARC VASCONCELLOS/THE ENTERPRISE

Brianna Cahoon, 4, of Randolph, above, plays a video game on the computer.

Parents struggle to balance work, day care

By KYLE ALSPACH
GateHouse news service

When her son was growing up, Anita O’Brien could never afford day care for him.

Even when the single mother started a job at Brockton Day Nursery, which gave her a 50 percent discount on tuition, she still couldn’t pay.

“The cost is crazy,” said O’Brien, 30, who lives in Brockton with her 9-year-old son, Julio. “If I had needed to pay for day care, I would’ve been left with nothing.”

O’Brien said she was able to have her mother take care of her son so that she could hold a job.

O’Brien, who works as a preschool teacher at Brockton Day Nursery, said juggling work and day care is a major struggle for most parents of her students.

“It becomes a cycle. You can’t work if you don’t have day care,” she said. “But if you have to pay for the day care you can never save. You can never get ahead.”

Lower-income parents can qualify for vouchers and other assistance that help cover the cost of child care and enable them to work.

Brockton Day Nursery provides child care to some preschoolers under the voucher program.

So does LaBelle Day School in Brockton. There, the cost for a week of full-time care of preschool-age children with a voucher ranges from $163 to $225. The cost is $227 a week for parents who pay a private rate.

MARC VASCONCELLOS/THE ENTERPRISE

Madeline Aucoin, 4, of Holbrook and Joshua Nazaire, 3, of Randolph play with building blocks.

If Lefsky and so many other parents around the South Shore think they’re facing exorbitant costs, they’re right: Massachusetts is the most expensive state in the nation when it comes to placing an infant in child care, according to the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies.

“Massachusetts of course jumps off the page in terms of what (child care) costs,” said Linda Smith, the executive director of the organization, which released its findings in October.

MARC VASCONCELLOS/THE ENTERPRISE

Mason Benton, 4, of Randolph crawls through a tunnel at Avon Children’s Center.

At an average of about $14,700 a year to place an infant in a child care center, parents of infants in full-time care pay considerably more than they would if their child were attending a Massachusetts state college - including in-state tuition, fees and room and board. The cost is even higher on the South Shore, according to a survey of dozens of area programs.

The care doesn’t get much cheaper as babies get older. The National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies reported that the average cost for preschool-aged children is $14,700 in Massachusetts.

The association did not look at costs for family child care programs, where children are cared for in caretakers’ homes. Such programs tend to be less expensive, but the cost is often still high, parents say.

It’s not just the price tag that’s high. The median cost of center-based care for infants is 16 percent of the salary of a two-wage family earning the state’s median income. For single parents, it absorbs a whopping 57 percent.

AMELIA KUNHARDT/The Patriot Ledger

Early childhood experts agree that enrichment programs, like this Spanish class taught by Ale Peary at Pilgrim Child Care in Duxbury, are important for children’s development. But finding and paying for programs that offer enrichment can be a challenge for parents.

“It’s typically the third largest expense in the household. Some mothers just go back to work for health insurance - their paycheck just goes to child care,” said Lisa Bragey, director of Community Care for Kids, a child care resource and referral agency based at Quincy Community Action Programs.

Low-income parents can qualify for vouchers and other assistance that help cover the cost of child care and enable them to work. But the wait for such help is long: 24,000 children in Massachusetts who qualify for financial help are on a waiting list.

No one knows how many children are in unlicensed programs that can operate more cheaply, albeit illegally, in part because they aren’t meeting state standards.

Quality at a cost

For parents at all income levels, cost is one of many factors complicating the search for suitable care for their kids.

Lefsky had two arrangements fall through until she found the program her son and daughter now attend. She described the process of finding care as “scramble, scramble, trying to find (programs that) were not just affordable but had openings for two kids.”

Alexis Levitt, an elder affairs lawyer who works three days a week from her home in Weymouth, also went through several arrangements before she found the ones her children are in now.

She sends her daughter to a center run by Bright Horizons, a nationwide chain, in Braintree. She is thrilled with that program, but it was too expensive to have both children there after her son was born.

So the son goes to a different program, and Levitt spends a total of 2 hours and 20 minutes of the days she works taking her children to day care and bringing them home.

AMELIA KUNHARDT/The Patriot Ledger

Eileen Lefsky picks up her daughter, Ainsley, 3, and son, Ronan, 1, from a family day care program in Weymouth.

Levitt said the quality of programs varied widely by cost, adding that she’s surprised it is not a bigger political issue.

“The affordable ones were not the quality that we wanted,” she said. “Talk about the plight of the middle class.”

Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women in Washington, said access to high-quality child care is a nationwide problem that seems to have little traction politically. The United States differs from most other industrialized countries, she said, which typically subsidize child care for all children, not just the poorest.

She said she is unsure why there isn’t more public demand for subsidized day care, given that 70.5 percent of women with children are in the labor force, according to the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies.

“We’ve worked for decades and decades on this issue, but it really is intransigent without more broad-based support from the public,” Gandy said. “Even the women who are struggling with this believe, as do their neighbors, that this is their own problem.”

“We as a country have got to figure out: Is child care something that this country needs?” said Smith, of the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies. “If it’s something that parents need, how can we figure out if we can share the cost of it, like we do colleges?”

Julie Jette may be reached at jjette@ledger.com.