The Childcare Cliff

Childcare has a way of turning joy into panic, not because we love our kids any less, but because the math stops making sense. I’m coming off a flu week and easing back into routine, and a conversation in my own circle brings me right back to a hard truth: so many families are one childcare bill away from drowning.

I share what it looked like in my house when we went from family help to daycare, why proximity mattered for sanity, and how quickly the monthly total climbed until it rivaled and then surpassed rent. I talk honestly about the career crossroads that show up when a paycheck no longer covers care, how health insurance can lock one parent into staying employed, and the ego and expectations that can push us to “power through” even when the cost is too high.

Then we zoom out to the bigger policy picture: maternity leave in the United States, the pay cuts that hit right after birth, and what happens when childcare subsidies get frozen or restricted. I break down why administrative “fixes” like more paperwork and appeals can still crush parents in real time, especially when the cost of living is already exploding through energy bills and grocery prices. If women are essential to the modern workforce, childcare support has to be treated like infrastructure, not a side issue.

If this hits home, subscribe so you don’t miss what comes next, share the episode with a working parent who needs to hear they’re not alone, and leave a review with the change you most want to see.

Transcript

Welcome And Life Update

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good morning. This is Steel Roses Podcast. This podcast was created for women by women to elevate women's voices. Happy Tuesday, everybody. I'm a little late in the game today. It's funny. Days off, it's not that they blur, but it's you know, they go a little bit, they're slow and then they go really fast at the end. And then you kind of miss your window to do things, and that's sort of what happened to me yesterday. Plus, I did remember something I needed to do that was urgent, so I had to do something yesterday. But nevertheless, I think you can all hear it in my voice. I am feeling better, bouncing back from my flu week. I don't even want to talk about it anymore, except for the fact that I am still dragging a little bit. Now, my usual routine, you all know, is um I prioritize meditation in the morning, even if I can only do 20 minutes. I always get up at about six o'clock um to get my day going before anyone else is awake. It's my time to really just have some peace in the morning, take a breath for myself, and just be for a little while before the craziness starts. Um, and by craziness, uh craziness, I really just mean like all the different various directions that I'm pulled into. Sometimes get to the end of my day, and I say to my husband, I'm like, I'm not crazy, right? Like they're I'm being, you all call me every five minutes, and he laughs. He's like, Yeah, he's like, you're our person. He's like, everyone in the house, I'm the person. My biggest problem to this day is I'm everybody's favorite person and they all want to hang out with me. And it sounds like, how is that a problem? Like, you know, Jenny, why would that be a problem? It's a problem because I can't be with everybody individually all the time. So it does pose a problem. Maybe problem is not the right word for it, but it is a challenge for me. Nevertheless, day two of spring break for me, home with the kids. So I I am excited. I had to hustle today. Um, this morning. Yesterday I had the idea to take the kids to the movies, and I guess everybody had that same idea for today, and I had to like rush to buy tickets this morning just to make sure we actually got tickets because they were basically sold out the whole theater. But that's very small in the grand scheme of issues. Something I wanted to raise, and it's something I haven't actually thought of in a while, but recently it came to mind because of a colleague that is gonna be having her baby soon. When I first had my son back in 2016, the thrill of becoming a mother and the thrill of, you know, you're finally having a child, you're finally going to be having your baby that you've been wanting. It quickly turned for me from I'm thrilled that I'm having a baby to I actually didn't really think about childcare. Now, I I some of you might be rolling your eyes a little bit. I, you know, and I wasn't young when I had my son. I was in my 30s, my I think I was 30 or 31 when I had him. And it just didn't occur to me the cost of child care when I was having him. Or prior to having kids, the cost of childcare didn't even occur to me that this is gonna be something I was gonna have to really deal with heavily. Now, I was very lucky um the first year, my mother-in-law, my parents took off, everybody helped me with my son. My mother-in-law ended up retiring, she stayed with him. There were some challenges there as you know, you as they happen, whenever your mother-in-law comes into the picture, when you have a child, there's always challenges, right? Because mothers know best, and but I'm a new mom knowing best, right? So there was always that that little drama. But can never say enough about how grateful I am to her for doing what she did, along with my parents. My mom, um, when my mother-in-law left for a couple months to go visit family, my mom took off of work. She took leave and she helped me with my son. So there was help along the way. It wasn't a struggle, yes, it was still a struggle. Was it always easy? No, not at all. Even with the help and and not having to pay for this help, it wasn't easy. There was a lot of personalities in the mix, there was a lot of opinions in the mix, there was a lot of strain in the mix. And, you know, a lot of it was on my shoulders to just deal with and navigate. We got through it, but it was a hard time. Now, we went from at one point, I did decide like I wanted everybody in daycare by me so I could stop having to go crazy running all over the place to pick up my kids and being stuck in traffic and everything. So I ended up um at one point getting all my kids into daycare. This was back in 2017. So my son went into daycare first in 2017. Um, now at the time, I was able to find a place where um it was about a, I think it was about 150, somewhere between 150 to$200 a week for daycare costs. This is low. This is actually very low. There was another place that was by me that was really cheap. Um, and they told me were the cheapest in town, and I could actually see why when I walked around the daycare center. So I didn't want to put my kids there. But this is very low, right?$150,$200 a week is actually pretty cheap. But in the grand scheme of things, at the time, you're paying rent, you're paying bills, you're paying car payments, you're doing all these other things, it adds up. And so you're talking eventually that you're paying, you know, let's say eight, call it$800 a month for daycare. Now, for some people, that's impossible. That's that is impossible. Some people are not able to even achieve that. Now, flash forward again another year in 2018 when all three of my kids were in daycare. Now, did it was it easier for me to have them in daycare as opposed to having them at my mother-in-law's? Yes, it was. Proximity was much closer, so that made it easier for me for my sanity, right? There was that. I really wanted them in daycare. Now, a lot of people are there's there's opposing arguments about that. I wanted my kids in daycare because I wanted them to get that almost like classroom-like exposure. I wanted them to get that socialization. I wanted them to be to start being tracked for milestones. I wanted to know as quickly as I could if there was any delays that I was, you know, needing to be aware of. So there was a lot of the mix there. Unfortunately, though, once we got all three kids into daycare, we got to a certain point where our daycare cost was surpassing our rent. And when that was happening, my parents um helped us. Now, there we got to a certain point where my husband turned to me and said, Well, I don't understand. I'm working. My check is supposed to cover daycare. And I said to him, It's not though. Your check isn't even covering it anymore. My dad is still helping us. And it was in that moment that my husband was like, This is ridiculous. Now, this happened in 19, right before COVID. So as soon as my husband realized, like, we're putting out more money for daycare than we're even taking in, he was like, That's it. I'm gonna call it. I'll stay home with the kids. This is often the pivotal moment that I reflect on that I've actually mentioned on the podcast before, where I say, there was a moment in time where I could have slowed down. And there's a moment of time where I could have been the one to scale back. It was in that moment. In that moment when my husband said, I will step back and you continue working. Now, there were two reasons for that. One, my job carried the health insurance. So it was like a natural, I had the health insurance, I'll just continue to work and we'll do it, you know, take it from here. Plus, I was making just slightly more money than him. It wasn't nominal at that point, but it was enough that we're like, you know what, I'll continue to work. And plus, my ego, right? My ego was huge at the time. I wanted to be this big career woman. Excuse me, I wanted to be this big career woman. And I had said, you know what, I'll continue to work. I got this. We're good. We'll we'll take it from here. You know, we all know how I feel about that. I went so rogue. But it was this big thing in our lives at a certain point where I'm like, you know, we were paying well over$2,000 a month for daycare. Now, again, that was for three kids. So I've been told by many people, like, wow, that's actually not that terrible. But even so, like, it did. It took over everything. It took all the money at one point, and we were like drowning basically because of all these costs. Not to mention the fact that when you have a child, you go into debt. So, besides the fact that I had to pay for my kids' births for C-sections, it was about$10,000 for kid. Beyond that, also, you take a hit when you go on maternity leave. Now, when you go on maternity leave, this is the other part that I didn't think about until I had my kids. I assumed, I made some kind of assumption in my head that there was some kind of plan there. I never investigated it. That was stupid. That was stupidity on my part. I never even gave it a thought. Oh, when I get pregnant, like I'm gonna want to stay home with my baby. It didn't even occur to me that there would be a challenge there. And there's a massive challenge for women across the US. I read articles after I had my kids about women who worked low-income jobs. There is no maternity leave, and they were trying to orchestrate when they were gonna have their baby so that they could have their baby over a long weekend and then make sure that they had at least three weeks home with their baby before they had to go back to work. Three weeks, mind you, within just three weeks to bond with your child, three weeks to be home with your child. Now, if you haven't had a baby yet, mother, the mother that comes out of you after you have a child, it go, it could go either way. I mean, you really, it depends on the person. I was incredibly attached to my kids. So once I had my son, like I remember like being like, I don't want to have to go back to work. Like, I actually do want to stay home with him, but there was no choice in that, right? I had to stay with whatever the limit of my maternity leave was. Now, I got really, really lucky that when I got pregnant with my son, I had just happened to transition over to a new job. And in that new job, the maternity leave benefits were paid 100% of my salary for three months straight. That was a shock because other places that I had asked around about, the benefits were you get six weeks at 70% of your pay. And you know you're gonna take a hit. Now, that's what I mean by the financial implication here. A lot of women don't have any maternity leave at all. If they get maternity leave, majority of them are not getting 100% of their salary, that's the financial hit. So that's financial hit number one. Financial hit number two is when you want to go back to work so that you can afford your child, that you have to actually pay for child care, which then also takes from your salary, which was already low already, and now it's already taken a hit because you were out of work for a couple of weeks at less than your normal pay. We're not starting off well. It took me years to recover after having kids financially. Years. The only thing that came in and the timing was very like it just happened to work out this way was my husband stopped work in 2019. It was right before the pandemic, and then we started getting stimulus checks. And that's what evened us out. It's the wildest thing to think about because that is the one thing that was able to even us out and get us back on our feet after having kids because we really took some financial hits. Now, I know some people that are very blessed that get months and months of maternity leave. They get a year of it. There's some people that I know that are very blessed that have family that help them, help them consistently on a regular basis, not just with their child care, just making sure that there's somebody there to take care of the kid and that they don't have to actually pay someone to do it. Like the blessing that that is, if you have that blessing, you need to recognize it because there are many people that are struggling that don't have that at all. Now, I wanted to, the reason why this came up to my mind is because my stepdaughter, um, I heard her talking with my husband about the child care and development fund and things getting frozen for people who do lean on state and government for support for their child care services. My stepdaughter is one of them. Now, she's a stand-up person, she's a stylist. She, her and her fiance have a nice home together. They're doing everything they can to work to make sure they have a nice solid future for their family. But this doesn't mean that they have loads of money laying around to pay for childcare. So my stepdaughter does apply for state aid. And in order to achieve that, you know, she obviously is a stylist, so she's not making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. She gets this funding and she's able to leverage it for her kids' childcare. Now, if that funding gets yanked, which it is in several states, not in New Jersey, thankfully, but right across in New York, funding is being yanked. Well, what do you do? If funding is being yanked and you're no longer getting the benefit that you used to get for childcare, how are you supposed to survive? It's not possible, right? It there isn't a real logical thing here. And unfortunately, it's the mothers that are um that are really suffering here. Um, I want to read directly from, I did look it up because I want to make sure I pulled it right. So as of early 2026, the Trump administration has frozen and restricted federal child care and development fund payments to at least five states California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York, impacting over 500,000 children. This action follows allegations of fraud, forcing states to provide additional attendance and licensing records to access funds. All right, now I understand that. You know, fraud is suspected, I get it. But now who's suffering for this, right? It's the people. The funding freeze could cost families roughly 400 million and directly threatens access to care for over 300,000 children relying on subsidies. In October 2023, Democrat federal funding expired, leaving 220,000 childcare programs nationwide without critical funding, causing many to face potential closures. Families denied through the programs, like the child care assistance program, may have rights to appeal through their state's department of family development. Okay, but how long does all this take? Now, and I say this as like a I under from my perspective, right? How long does it take me to actually make an eye doctor appointment? I'm gonna do it right after this. But I'm I'm saying it out loud, like let's let's call it like this. If you're not even just an eye doctor appointment, for example, I have an HSA card. I took my son to the doctor the other day and I had to pay this invoice that was about$450, right? So I take out my HSA card and I'm gonna pay this invoice. And HSA denies it. They say they need, they need, um, they need to see the invoice. They need to, you know, verify that this is a health expense, right? So I have to deal with that. I still haven't done it because it's paperwork. To sit down and actually do paperwork, I have a little pile on my desk of actual paperwork things that I have to get to that on a regular day, I can't just sit and spend hours doing it because it does take time. So for this, the reason why I'm saying referencing that is because for families that are denied assistance to go, they're probably rushing to file the paperwork because they need to, right? But if they don't have time for it, if they have young children, there's all these hoops in the way, right? So let's say they get through all the hoops and they file the paperwork for an appeal to get child care for their kids. How long does that take? And then in that time where they don't have funded childcare for their kids, what are they doing? Now, sure, there are some people that have taken advantage of the system. Absolutely. I'm 100% sure of that. I've seen it and I it pisses me off, right? But what about the families that need it? They're suffering now because other people took advantage of the system and now they have to jump through the hoops to try to get the funding for care for their children. And it's like this impossible feat now. And then in the meantime, they're drowning. They're literally drowning. The cost of energy in the in New Jersey right now is obscene. I think our gas bill and our electric bill combined is probably, you know, nearing$1,000 a month just because of where we're at right now. Grocery bills are obscene. If you want to eat healthy, if you want to eat healthy in New Jersey, I'm gonna Google it right now, what the cost is because for my kids and for my family, like I've actually migrated a little bit more towards healthier eating for everybody, right? That's something I've been doing for a while, and I've been trying to push myself over in that direction. I may have to go back. At some point, we may hit a critical breaking point too in my household where we can't buy the healthier products. I'm gonna have to get the stuff that's not good for you, the stuff that causes inflammation and it stuff that my kids, you know, are mildly allergic to. The twins, for example, we, I think I had mentioned on one of the other episodes, had discovered that they um they have a sensitivity to gluten, is what it looks like to me. And they their stomachs swell up anytime they have gluten or pasta and um and gluten, i.e., pasta. Like anytime I made pasta at home, their stomach swelled up. I had to stop making it until I found a healthier alternative that worked. And then I started making that and everybody's fine. But from 99 cents a box, it's$5 a box. What are you supposed to do? So all of these combined, it's almost like this impossible thing to achieve. And yet we're forced in this, it's like a between a rock and a hard place. There's almost no place to go. I don't even have a solution for this. I don't have any smart commentary on it. I'm kind of just putting this out there as like a larger issue in the world that goes almost unrecognized and it goes, it goes to the it gets pushed to the side because it affects women directly. I can't walk away from my job and just be home for the summer, right? I'm making arrangements to try to figure that out. But even in making arrangements to try to figure that out for somebody to watch my kids for the summer, well, not summer, they're going to camp. But like, even that, I had to pick the less expensive town camp. Like, I had, you know, like there's sacrifices you have to make all over the place. It's just, it's this crazy issue that we're dealing with today that people it's impacting us tremendously. And as women, it's impacting us directly because again, the expectation historically is that the women are home with their kids. So this benefit that only really directly affects working mothers and families at the poverty line, it's not, it's not being resolved. It's not a priority. It's not something that anyone is going to tackle anytime soon because it only affects us. The part that's really sad is women are essential to the modern workforce. We make up 47 to 49% of the labor force. Our participation drives economic growth, it increases productivity, and it boosts company profits through diverse perspectives. Many Fortune 500 companies that have higher female representation on our boards outperform others with less. Women have leadership skills. Women are hard workers. We can do things that no one else can do. I think I said it the other day when I had the slow. A working mom that is trying to beat the clock with being sick is like the fiercest animal you're gonna encounter because we are so driven and focused on getting things done that we will not think of anything else. We will make sure that these things happen. It's a sad state of affairs, in my opinion. And I always think to myself, if I had the lottery, you know, these people, these they win billions of dollars in the lottery. How amazing would it be to be able to set up a fund or to set up a scholarship and just be able to give grant grants to people, give money to mothers, to, to families that are in need to give them a little bit of breathing room so they don't have to be stressed every wakey moment of their lives. That's the dream. I mean, if I could ever achieve something like that, that would be the greatest dream and the greatest accomplishment. And this one went a little bit long, but I had a little bit more time to record because spring break. Thank you for being with me today. I hope everyone is having a really, really great week. Guys, fingers crossed that by next week I'll be all the way back in action and able to just sound like myself and be myself because I'm not quite there yet. But again, thank you for hanging out with me on this one. I appreciate all of you and I will catch you on the next one. Take care.