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Child care is expensive everywhere, but some states cost more than others
Working parents, beware: child care costs will eat up a huge part of your personal budget.
This is probably true anywhere, but where you live makes a big difference. Child care costs can vary widely by region. According to CNN’s guide to the most expensive states for child care, my home state of Massachusetts is the priciest in the nation. Cost of living here is high, but it’s not just a case of people having higher incomes and paying more dollars. The percentage of your household income that’s eaten up by day care here is higher than anywhere else.
Childcare here typically costs about sixteen percent of household income. At the other end of the spectrum, moms and dads in Mississippi pay just over seven percent of their incomes to have their little ones cared for while they work. Why the big gap?
How much freedom should day care centers have to create and enforce their own rules?
I live in Colorado and can attest to the fact that it’s a fairly vanilla state.
To the Colorado Department of Human Services, that appears to be part of the problem.
They’ve issued a new list of proposed regulations for all childcare providers in the state, which has some of the centers crying that they don’t like being treated as children themselves.
The set of rules is long — 98 pages long — and, well, diverse, like requiring that the dolls children play with are diversified with at least three races, and that teachers are prohibited from eating fast food in front of the children as well as from wearing clothes that don’t cover their laps and shoulders.
Federal guidelines recommend that families spend no more than 10% of their income on child care expenses. But in the real world, many spend two and three times that amount because they simply have no choice. And while quality child care is expensive no matter where you live, in some states it now costs more to send your kid to day care than it does to send your kid to college. Continue reading »
In what appears to be a deliberate attempt to fan the flames of the mommy wars, a psychologist has declared all working mothers to be child abusers.
Jeffery Fine, Ph.D., says that babies need unconditional love and moms who work outside the home can’t possibly provide that. Continue reading »
Summer camp is a great way to keep kids entertained and out of trouble in the summer months, but in today’s economy, luxuries like camp are often the first thing to go.
Joan Brackin, a 64-year-old grandmother of nine from Grant City, MO, has come up with a solution for her family. According to the Los Angeles Times, Brackin takes in all of her grand-kids for a full week every summer and holds “Grandma Camp.”
Finding a good day care is so hard these days, you have to accept compromises. Maybe your kid’s day care is a little pricey, doesn’t stay open as late as you’d like, or maybe the day care sells cocaine.
An Arkansas couple was arrested for selling cocaine out of the same house where they operate a day care. Husband Timothy Boston got caught in a sting operation by police. Catching a whiff of the jig being up, Boston fled to Texas where he was arrested. His wife, Denise, was arrested at the couple’s home/child care center the same day.
When Julie Powell left her two small children at a drop-in day care facility in Billings, Montana, she thought she had done her due diligence. She checked out the company’s website and inspected the facility. After learning that the day care had been in business for over 20 years, she felt confident in leaving her kids there while she spent an afternoon playing golf with her husband. But perhaps she should have paid closer attention to the name of the day care before entrusting them with her children: Toddler Escape Drop-In Child Care. Continue reading »
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