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Between the rising cost of tuition and long waitlists, child care has become the new college. According to Care.com’s 2024 Cost of Care report, on average, one year of daycare costs more than $16,000, up 13 percent since 2022. Even if the cost isn’t a barrier, 43 percent of parents report having spent more than four months on at least one waitlist. With these numbers in mind, it’s unsurprising that many Americans these days are discouraged from starting a family.
At VOICES for Alabama’s Children, we want to ensure that all of Alabama’s children are safe, healthy, educated and economically secure in order to reach their fullest potential. That’s why we collaborated with the Alabama Partnership for Children and Alabama School Readiness Alliance to develop a road map addressing Alabama’s child care crisis.
Among our recommendations are strategies to improve the affordability and accessibility of child care, and I’m pleased to see Alabama’s own Senator Katie Britt leading this charge at the federal level.
Sens. Katie Britt, R-AL, and Tim Kaine, D-VA, recently introduced a legislative package that tackles this issue head-on by empowering and equipping parents to determine their child’s best path. This pro-family legislation would help ensure that parents can pursue a career and grow a family simultaneously.
Working parents deserve access to quality child care. In some families, a lack of affordable options can force parents to make a seemingly impossible choice: spend time with their children at the expense of their finances or compromise on care. No parent should have to make that choice.
Several provisions in Sens. Britt and Kaine’s proposed legislative package—which consists of two bills—would ease working families’ financial burdens, complementing Alabama’s new Child Care Tax Credit, part of the 2024 Working for Alabama legislative package.
The bills would make several changes to the tax code to put families and parents first. This includes expanding the Employer-Provided Child Care Tax Credit, making it easier for businesses to help their employees with child care, increasing the amount workers can put into a family’s child care assistance plan through the Dependent Care Assistance Program (D-CAP), and increasing the size of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC) and making it refundable. These tax benefits for families are much-needed improvements that will make affording child care and other necessities easier for working parents and their children.
Moreover, the bills would boost the supply of child care workers and ensure parents have more choices when it comes to the supervision of their children. Low wages within the industry drive far too many qualified individuals away from the field, but Sens. Britt and Kaine’s plan provides a solution by creating a competitive grant program for state and local governments to supplement child care providers’ pay. Similar programs in other states, including Oklahoma and Nebraska, have proven to decrease worker turnover and attract additional workers.
As Sens. Britt and Kaine wrote in an opinion piece they co-authored recently for Fox News, “…these measures would lower the cost of child care for families, expand the choices parents have, encourage businesses to support child care supply, and get more resources to child care providers and to the child care workforce.”
The policies contained in this package are extremely popular with voters on both sides of the aisle. Recent polling found that 89 percent of voters want candidates to help working parents access child care, and 76 percent of voters support increasing the CDCTC. 2022 poll results further support Sens. Britt and Kaine’s legislation, with results showing that 86 percent of voters think that quality child care is a good use of taxpayer money.
This legislation would boost our state’s economy by decreasing the number of parents who feel they have no choice but to leave the workforce to care for their children while expanding access to and choice in child care for those same workers. This is particularly true of working mothers, who are often the first to exit the workforce to care for their children due to a lack of affordable care options.
Sen. Britt understands firsthand the challenges that come with being a working mom and knows the benefits our state and the entire nation will see if we make being a working parent easier. Members of Congress should back this pro-family and pro-workforce plan.
