From Public News Service
Ohio ranks 29th among states in overall child well-being, according to the latest Annie E. Casey Foundation Kids Count Data Book.
Child care continues to pose challenges for working parents, and the new data showed average child care costs for one child in 2021 topped $10,000 per year.
Kelly Vyzral, senior health policy associate for the Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio, said women are five to eight times more likely than men to experience negative employment consequences related to caregiving. Lack of affordable child care also disproportionately affects families of color and immigrant families.
“We can’t expect parents — and many times this is especially relevant for single moms — we can’t expect them to go back to work, if they don’t have a safe place to leave their children,” Vyzral asserted.
In 2021, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows Ohio hit a twenty-year low in the number of child care workers, with around 12,000 across 88 counties. According to the report, the nation’s already insufficient child care workforce dropped by more than a third in just two months at the beginning of the pandemic, and has since rebounded to 996,000 workers by April 2023, still far below pre-pandemic levels.
An executive order issued by President Biden this year aims to expand child care access by lowering costs and raising worker wages.
Vyzral acknowledged it is a start, and pointed out state lawmakers should continue to implement policies aimed at addressing the crisis.
“There’s money in the budget for those publicly funded child care centers,” Vyzral argued. “And there’s also scholarships for spots within those child care centers for workers. So for the people that are working in these day care centers, to send their children to day care, because they often in order to work, have to have some place to put their children.”
Nationwide, the average salary for a child care worker was around $29,000 per year or around $14 an hour in 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Eric Tegethoff, Producer
