As the school year comes to a close, many families may be left scrambling to find safe, reliable, summer child care that they can afford, a new report suggests.
A by the , a left-leaning think tank, finds that the typical family鈥攄efined as two parents and two children with a household income equal to each state鈥檚 median income for such a household鈥攕pends 20 percent of their summer income on just five weeks of summer care.
鈥淥n average, we found that parents are paying a little over $3,000 [nationally] on summer care for two children,鈥� said , the organization鈥檚 policy analyst, who conceived the report and did the analysis. 鈥淲e know that this is just unaffordable for most families.鈥�
The cost of summer care varies wildly by location. The report ranks Nevada and New York as the two least affordable states for summer learning. In Nevada, parents could expect to spend 51 percent of median summer income on child care, which amounts to more than $6,700 for the average family. In New York, it would amount to 35 percent, or just over $6,000.
The high cost of care may be forcing some families to go without.
The report lists data from the U.S. Census鈥� Survey of Income and Program Population that show the number of children without regular care goes up in the summer months. For preschoolers with working mothers, the share of children without regular care went from 11 percent in the spring of 2005 to 42 percent in the summer of 2006. For grade-school children with working mothers, it went from 37 percent to 49 percent.
Negative Consequences
Novoa argues children from low-income families are hurt the most by this.
鈥淲hen they鈥檙e unable to access care, that contributes to what鈥檚 called the summer-learning slide,鈥� said Novoa. 鈥淜ids who have more limited access to high-quality care and high-quality early-learning opportunities, they鈥檙e disproportionally disadvantaged.鈥�
Novoa found that most parents reported signing their children up for summer programs that lasted four to six weeks while the typical summer vacation runs 10 to 12 weeks.
鈥淲hen you have summer care that is so unaffordable that parents can鈥檛 afford to keep their child in a program continuously and they have to rely on these patchwork systems, that can be really destructive for children鈥檚 development and their learning,鈥� said Novoa. 鈥淚f children are cycling in and out of different child-care arrangements, that helps create these gaps in learning.鈥�
The report cites the as a possible solution to the lack of affordable summer child care. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., would provide child-care assistance to low- and middle-income families with children younger than 13 and ensure that no one pays more than 7 percent of their income for child care.
The report was compiled with state-level data from the
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