Child care is expensive – second only to the mortgage or rent in the average family budget. Infant care is more expensive than in-state public college tuition in 31 states. And costs to parents have nearly doubled in the last 25 years.
Yet in those same 25 years, as the share of children in some kind of child care setting has grown to 75 percent of those under age 5, child-care teachers and staff have seen no real increase in their earnings, according to a report released Tuesday by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley.
Nearly half of all child-care workers are so poor that they qualify for public assistance like food stamps, Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit, according to the report, “Worthy Work, STILL Unliveable Wages,” an update of a 1989 national child care staff study.
[For more of this story, written by Brigid Schulte, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/...-earn-poverty-wages/]
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