Relentless inflation and a stagnant job market have thrust the economy to the forefront of the November midterms. In the run-up to election day, USA TODAY Money reporters fanned out across the country to examine how Americans are coping with the financial squeeze, from the gut-punch of sudden layoffs and endless job searches to the daily grind of making ends meet. This is the fifth piece in a six-part series.
Diana Christopher starts most days with a dilemma.
Christopher, a 41-year-old New York City resident, needs to be at work in The Bronx by 8 a.m. Her twin toddlers' day care center in Washington Heights opens at the same time. The distance isn't the problem, just the timing. Her husband is typically the default drop-off parent, but sometimes
his work days start even earlier than hers do.
"How do I get us to two different locations at the same time?" she said. Sometimes, the answer is the less-than-ideal reality many working parents know all too well: "I would just be late to work."
"It's not a fun way to start your day, of just knowing you're behind, immediately," Christopher, a member of New Yorkers United for Child Care, said.
Christopher said her boss is mostly understanding in those moments. There are plenty of working parents in the United States who could risk their employment under the same circumstances. Thousands do, battling the monetary burden of child care while managing the mental and emotional drain of juggling various schedules inherent to daily life.
Families need care they can afford, obtain and actually use during their working hours. Today, parents across the country say that's hard to find.
For some, the logistics and cost of child care prevent them from having the families they've always wanted. Kyra Betts, a 37-year-old mother in St. Louis, has two little boys she loves. She and her husband spend more than $15,000 annually on their 3-year-old's preschool. That $1,300 monthly bill is a relief compared to the $2,500 they were paying just a few months ago, before her oldest started kindergarten.
But still, those bills stop her from addressing immediate needs, like buying new tires for her car; long-term financial goals like establishing an emergency fund or college savings for her boys; and even big-picture family planning dreams.
"I was telling my husband not that long ago that I would like to have a daughter, and he said, 'Well, who's gonna watch (them)? We can't afford to put another kid in school.' I said, 'You're right,'" Betts told USA TODAY. "I've had to give that up. But he was absolutely right."
Christopher waited until she was 40 to have children, she said, partly because of the financial burden of parenting.
"It was a very big conversation about, do we have a family? When do we have a family? How large of a family? All of that," she said, adding that she was set on having one child. "Then we found out we had twins. And I was immediately panicked, just from the logistical, like, again, how are we going to pay for this? How am I going to do this?"
'Everything is so expensive'
Betts said her household income is just over $100,000 per year. But today's child care costs are becoming unmanageable, even for families with six-figure incomes.
"Everything is so expensive. Everything, all the time," Betts said. Her electricity bill is $600 per month, and her monthly mortgage is more than $2,000. Add child care and the food, clothes and other costs of raising growing boys, she said, and her family's finances are "not as comfortable as I would like it to be."
Christopher's annual household income is $130,000, which includes her full-time salary as an occupational therapist in the city's public school system; her husband's part-time work as a professional actor; and their side hustles as sailors leading tour boat cruises on some nights and weekends. Her family's current child care schedule is a jigsaw puzzle that changes on a daily basis. Her husband watches their twins two days each week while Christopher works. He also watches the kids when she works her second job on evenings and weekends, and vice versa when he picks up those cruise shifts instead. He's turned down a lot of acting work since becoming a father, Christopher said.
On the three days each week he's not watching the twins, the kids go to a local child care facility. The twins are eligible for free 2-K as part of New York City's universal child care rollout, but there are limited seats and Christopher's kids were waitlisted over the summer. She's hopeful slots will open up later this year as other families move or change their own child care plans.
For now, Christopher and her husband spend $541 a week for three days of child care, or about $26,000 annually − a typical amount for American families, according to Care.com. The online marketplace found the average weekly day care cost for one infant is $332. Costs vary by state and are typically less expensive for older children.
If they put their kids in child care five days a week, her husband could work more. But that would cost $810 weekly, and that's not an option.
"We can't afford, frankly, to put them in full time," Christopher said. Even with part-time child care expenses, she said her family often skips out on outings in the city, other travel and college savings. The kids' grandparents help out with child care occasionally, but her family has no other regular child care help or babysitters.
Center-based child care for families with two children costs more than rent in every state, according to Child Care Aware of America. The average U.S. family pays nearly $12,000 annually for child care, according to The Foundation for Economic Education, a nonprofit, and child care costs have risen by nearly 30% in five years − nearly twice as fast as inflation.
"We're talking about, you know, mortgage-level expenses for many American families. And of course, this is part of a broader affordability crisis," said Diogo Costa, economist and president of The Foundation for Economic Education. He mentioned rising grocery prices and the country's housing shortage as other big financial stressors for families.
The child care crunch is being felt on all sides, Costa said: "At the same time, parents complain that they're spending too much, workers say that they're earning too little and providers are struggling to stay open." Costa said that while there are some sectors becoming more efficient and less expensive with advanced technology, child care costs have understandably stayed high and even risen because it's "a very labor-intensive sector."
"You cannot simply automate holding a baby," he said.
Neha Ruch, author of "The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids – and Come Back Stronger Than Ever," said "the math isn't mathing" for many U.S. families, and dwindling flexible work options exacerbate the issue that often prompts mothers to leave the workforce.
Christopher's job secures her family's health insurance, so stepping away from work or going part time to cut down on child care costs isn't an option. She pinches pennies by dressing her kids in hand-me-downs and getting them secondhand toys. But even their grocery bills, she said, are "pretty absurd" because "everything is times two" with twins.
"It adds up very, very quickly. And we've always had to be a two-income household," Christopher said, adding that they can't afford for her husband to stay home and watch the kids full time, either. "It's just that chicken and egg cycle of like, OK, well, you need to go to work to pay for this, but if you're at work then you need to pay for more."
'If we made too much we would not qualify'
Christopher's household income is significantly higher than the nation's median household income of about $84,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Azteca Druce Valerio-Bedolla, 26, is a mother in West Jordan, Utah, with three children, ages 3, 4 and 7. Her husband makes $70,000 annually as an account manager, and her full-time work at Starbucks used to bring their household income up to $100,000 a year.
But in October, Druce Valerio-Bedolla got a notice from the state's Department of Workforce Services that her family no longer qualified for child care assistance. The department changed its program income limits starting in October, from assisting families who earned up to 85% of the state median income, to enrolled families who earn 65%, according to The Times-Independent. New applicants to the program can't make more than 50% of the state median income. More than 900 families and 1,500 children, including Azteca's family and three kids, are impacted by the change.
"It sucks. It’s my job as a parent to make sure my kids are safe and taken care of and they don’t have to see the burden of adult life," she said. "And it kind of just feels like I failed in a way."
With assistance, her family was paying a monthly copay of $180 for child care, for her two youngest to receive full-time care and for her oldest, who is in school, to receive before and after school care and full-time care during summer breaks. If they were to pay out of pocket for child care, she said, it would cost about $2,800 monthly − which is more than their rent.
Before the income limits changed, keeping child care assistance felt like the most important thing.
"My husband would have to decline promotions, because if we made too much we would not qualify," she said. “And I have also declined promotions of being a manager, a shift lead, because of this."
Now, none of those sacrifices seem to matter.
"I can’t have a job now," Druce Valerio-Bedolla said. "And because I can’t work, we’re short on bills by like $500."
She’s hoping her podcast and social media content creation can turn into income at some point. It’s something she can do from home in the meantime while she’s with her kids, she said, and "seems to be the only option at this point, right now." Plus, Druce Valerio-Bedolla wants to work, so she has an identity outside of motherhood and can socialize with other adults.
"I’m a better mother and I’m a better wife when motherhood and being a wife isn’t the only thing that I’m allowed to be," she said.
What other parents are saying
Some parents have taken to social media to lament about child care costs.
"That's a mortgage," one father said to his partner on TikTok in September as they humorously discussed child care costs. "No wonder no one wants to go to work, it's cheaper to stay home than to send the kids to day care. That's like sending them to college."
Paige Connell, a mother and content creator with nearly 400,000 followers on TikTok, responded last year to an expectant parent who was trying to justify child care costs that rivaled one parent's salary.
"Child care is insanely expensive," Connell said, including that for four kids she typically spends more than $50,000 on child care annually. But she added, "when you leave the workforce, oftentimes, your lifetime earnings go down."
These sentiments are reflected in several recent, national surveys. An Ipsos survey of 2,500 American adults for BMO Financial Group, released in August, found 82% of parent respondents say the cost of raising children has "gotten out of control," and 79% of all respondents wonder how people around them can afford to have families. A July report from Care.com found that most people in the sandwich generation, who take care of both their children and aging parents, feel financially strained due to care costs, have deprioritized their savings because of those costs and 55% have considered leaving the workforce because of the stress of caregiving.
Luckily for Christopher and her husband, their twins' day care program is "literally right across the street from us," so they aren't losing too much time to the drop-off and pickup process, which they know is a problem for many families. A 2025 survey of more than 800 parents of school-age children by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found 3 in 10 parents have missed work and 11% have lost a job due to needing to take their children to and from school or other activities.
Overwhelming financial stress due to rising child care costs is pervasive among families with strong social networks and family support, too. Christopher said her parents and in-laws are "very involved," and they have friends who pitch in sometimes to watch the twins. Especially right after Christopher's three-month maternity leave ended, she said, her husband took minimal work and the babies' grandparents stepped in to take two-week care shifts.
But once the twins turned 18 months, she said, they realized the "financial hit" of her husband's lost income wasn't sustainable. And with toddlers who could now walk, run and climb, it didn't feel fair or feasible to ask their parents, who have their own health concerns, to watch them both solo for six hours or more at a time.
Free child care programs are expanding, but most families are still struggling
A handful of free child care programs have been piloted and implemented in communities across the country, including a statewide universal child care program in New Mexico that started in the fall of 2025.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on a promise to provide free, universal child care to New Yorkers, too. While free child care has expanded to thousands more families under his tenure so far, it will take a few more years for the program to reach universal status.
Meanwhile, families like Christopher's are still struggling. There are more child care seats available for 3-year-olds in New York, so Christopher is hopeful she'll feel some relief soon. But for millions of other families in the United States, free child care still feels like a pipe dream.
"It just feels like we are in a system that is not designed for families," Christopher said.
Madeline Mitchell's role covering women and the caregiving economy at USA TODAY is supported by a partnership with Pivotal and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.
Reach Madeline at memitchell@usatoday.com and @maddiemitch_ on X.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Child care costs continue to rise. Can anyone afford to keep up?
