Ask any American with young children what their No. 1 household expense is, and you’ll hear the same answer almost every time: child care. Each family finds its own way to manage. Some parents are pushed out of the workforce. Others work jobs they wouldn’t take otherwise or hold down multiple jobs in order to meet their families’ needs.
In order to show you how real families are navigating this child care challenge, HuffPost is profiling parents around the country. If you’d like to be featured in an installment, email us at parents@huffpost.com.
Children’s ages: 3.5 years old and 2 years old
Location: Windsor, Colorado
Occupation: Peterich has worked for a number of corporations, most recently in a sales position. She left the workforce in August to stay home with her children. Her husband owns a roofing business.
Monthly take-home pay: Peterich’s take-home pay when she was employed was about $2,930 per month
Monthly child care costs: $1,940 for full-time daycare for both children
Child care plan: The children started at a daycare center when they were 4 and 5 months old. “It’s owned by a small local corporation called ABC. When we started, it was owned by a local couple and didn’t have any affiliations, but it was bought, so ABC gave us a grandfathered rate. I feel fortunate that [for] both kids monthly it’s under two grand because I think we’d be looking more like $2,500 for both kids at the current rate.”
Peterich’s 3.5-year-old son qualifies for two hours and forty minutes of public preschool, four days a week, because he has an Individualized Education Plan available to any child with special needs. She believes her daughter will qualify for similar services due to her hearing loss. This free public care will continue after Peterich leaves the workforce.
“I’m going to do a little bit of work to support my husband, but I’m not on the payroll. I’ll be doing some social media marketing for his business and doing some in-person network marketing. I’ll have a few hours a week that I need to get work done. So I’ve asked my mother-in-law to help me on Wednesdays at our house. And then I’ve just asked her if I have something coming up the next week, can I say, ‘Hey, can I drop the kids off on Thursday afternoon?’ Using some grandparent childcare.” Peterich mentioned that her community recreational center also has $3 drop-in child care.
To structure their days, Peterich says that in addition to her son’s preschool program, she plans on using activities like soccer lessons at the recreational center and story time at the local library.
Work arrangement: Peterich said her decision to leave the workforce “was 50-50 financial, and [we’ve] also just become a little bit disappointed with the care that’s offered. [The daycare center was] great when our babies were infants, so they just needed babysitting, but now we’re getting to the age where we would like to see a little bit more curricula. We’re still seeing that babysitting in the classrooms for our 3.5-year-old. So that was about half of it, and then looking at the numbers and saying, ‘This is the care that we’re getting for this [price]?’ If we were to go to more of a pre-K, there are limited hours — the pre-Ks don’t have full-time. And then getting both kids there, they would have two spots in two different classrooms — none of it made sense to move them from where they are with looking at what my salary is. So I would say that the disappointment with the care also fed into, ‘It’s just not worth it if we pay for a higher-priced childcare.’”
“My husband got so busy with work that I was kind of doing three jobs at once, with a lot of personal burnout from my corporate job, trying to fit in all the house stuff, all the parenting stuff. I just kept telling him, ‘This is what my paycheck looks like.’ We also have separate bank accounts, so I think he didn’t fully have that understanding of how low it was until I waved in his face. He said, ‘Look, if I sell this many roofs, you can quit your job.’ And he did that very quickly.”
Peterich has created a spreadsheet detailing all of the family’s expenses.
“We have been really diving deep into my bank accounts. He did the same thing. We figured out that we had several streaming subscriptions that we don’t use, so we canceled those. I started trying to enact the grocery budget immediately, looking at what’s on sale and building a weekly menu off of that. We obviously decided that we needed a joint bank account if I’m going to have a $0 income, and now we’ve just been trying to kind of assign what the roles will look like, with me trying to do just a little bit of support work for him.”
“I never, ever, ever envisioned myself as a stay-at-home mom. Now that it’s happening, I do have that feeling of, ‘I don’t want to miss these years with my kids.’ But I feel like I’m a little bit out of my league, and it feels like we’re just gonna be learning as we go. I never dreamed of being a stay-at-home or full-time parent, and I was actually pretty afraid of it for a while. Both are hard. Working full-time is hard, and parenting full-time is hard. But I get to witness more of my kids, and one other factor is I feel like we’re just blowing through our weekends so quickly because we’re trying to fit everything in. It’s that weekend warrior mindset where we only have two days to do all the things that are on our bucket list for the summer. So we go hiking, and I want to go to the zoo, and I want to go to this museum, and we want to travel and we want to do all these things. I love the thought of having more time during the week to just explore where we live because any time that they have to stay home from school, it’s usually illness-related, so we’re not going out and having fun.”
What would help their family: Finding health care outside of Peterich’s job has been a challenge. “Since my husband’s a business owner, he’s technically a 1099 employee. So no benefits available to him outside of the marketplace for health care.” With Peterich leaving the workforce, she said, “We’re looking at doing a med share, or there’s a United Health Plan that you could opt into if you’re approved for it — the catch is that only about 25% of U.S. citizens can get the underwriting for this plan based on health, so we’re still waiting to see. Otherwise, we’ll probably do a med share because it’s a little bit more affordable, but I know the coverage is questionable.”
Peterich also wishes her former employer had been more supportive during her pregnancy. “I anticipate not wanting to go back to a corporation because I have a lot of bitterness toward the support that is given to parents. But I think I will end up working [again] in some capacity, whether it’s for a local company, whether it’s starting my own business — I’ve kind of tossed around a few ideas for starting my own business. But I do think that I’m done with corporate America.”
While pregnant, Peterich was put on an improvement plan at work.
“I had this fear through the end of my pregnancy that I would lose my job right when I needed it the most ― when I needed my health coverage the most. And I just was so naive — I thought my entire maternity leave would be covered. They allow you to be out for 12 weeks, but you’re unpaid. And so then I had to come back after six weeks, and I wasn’t ready. We had a hospitalization and a surgery at three-and-a-half weeks. It felt like I didn’t get to enjoy my maternity leave, and there were no clauses in there for that. I felt like I was kind of robbed of my maternity leave, but some moms have to burn through their whole maternity leave while they’re visiting their child in the NICU or their child’s fighting for their life. It just made me so angry that we don’t have support there.
“I came back earlier than anticipated, and my boss’s boss — our regional vice president said, ’I just want you to understand that you’re coming back to a full-time job. So we’re going to expect full-time out of you.’”
Peterich says more flexibility at work and a higher salary would have made a difference.
“I wish that my employer was paying more and had a little bit more generosity with [the] newborn age. I wish that I had gotten to spend a year or eight months with my kids while we were trying to figure out breastfeeding.”
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