DENVER (KDVR) — Finding available and affordable child care is a pressing concern for many Colorado families.
Anecdotally, for a lot of new parents of kids younger than six, before they go to school, paying for childcare is like taking out a second mortgage. Many believe it’s the cost of childcare that causes the biggest problems, but the Common Sense Institute ran the numbers and found many counties in Colorado are in a childcare desert.
The Common Sense Institute found that there are not enough spots for all the kids who need care. About 51% of the state is in a “childcare desert.”
The institute analyzed the top nine counties in the Front Range, including Douglas, Jefferson, Adams and Weld County. Eight of the nine counties only have a percentage of the spots they need.
What’s contributing to this? During the pandemic 16,000 childcare centers closed and many childcare workers left the industry.
“Even if we had more centers, we’d still have to staff them, and so there’s kind of pressure on all sides. A lot of those centers that closed during the pandemic haven’t reopened. We looked across the state and for every two slots for children under six there are three kids. So that’s a shortage of 88,500 slots across the state,” said Tamra Ryan the economic mobility fellow with the Common Sense Institute.
Ryan said to fix this, it’s about looking into some alternatives, getting communities involved and passing legislation.
This problem also impacts women’s role in the workforce.
Due to the price of childcare, sometimes all of one parent’s salary goes to pay for childcare. Some parents believe it would be better for one parent to stay with the children.
The study found that half of Colorado parents report they’ve made sacrifices that affect their career due to the lack of affordable child care, including cutting their work hours, taking unpaid time off, leaving a job entirely or not looking for a job to take care of children.
About 17% of mothers of young children want to work, but blame child care as their main reason for not working.
“We call those sidelined workers, and across the state, there are 10,200 women who are sidelined from the workforce. So we did a calculation that if we could increase supply and affordability, and all of those women were to go back into the workforce, the impact on the state’s GDP would be $3.8 billion and it would create 29,000 jobs. Because you think about when one worker goes back into the workforce, it has a ripple effect,” Ryan said.
Ryan said that number doesn’t count fathers who stay home, mothers who want to care for their children full time or mothers who plan to go back to work after their child is old enough for school.
Some parents even report when someone leaves the workforce for a period of time, they may take a hit in their career, which potentially decreases their earning potential in the long term.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
