This summer, WSKG asked listeners about their experiences with child care in the Southern Tier. WSKG’s Aurora Berry drew on the responses to report on low availability and high costs in our area. She spoke with WSKG News Director Phoebe Taylor-Vuolo about what listeners said about parenting and finding child care in our coverage area.
Phoebe Taylor-Vuolo: Aurora, tell me a little bit about this survey first.
Aurora Berry: So Phoebe, when we went into this call out process, my goal was to get a general sense of the lives of families with kids that need child care. So our questionnaire was designed to sort of dig into that. I'd also like to note that this is not a scientific survey by any means. We should think of it more as a callout for folks to share their experiences. That's something that we're both very grateful for. So thank you! We ended up hearing from around 20 people.
PTV: What kinds of questions did you ask people in our area?
AB: Our goal was to learn more about the ways that child care shortages in our area were impacting people's personal lives. So some questions that I thought had some interesting answers included asking whether families had ever made any big life changes based on child care availability and cost. So that includes moving, cutting back on hours at work or school, or even leaving the workforce altogether. We also asked this very simple question: ‘are you satisfied with the child care options in your area?’
PTV: Yeah. Were they, were people satisfied?
AB: No. At least generally not in the group that responded to our callout. We did have one person from Broome County who said that yes, they were satisfied. And we also had some people with some more nuanced takes. One said they were happy with the provider they currently have, but the stress of finding a spot in the first place was “overwhelming,” and that they knew friends who had panic attacks because of the stress of finding daycare.
One parent summed it up this way: “No, you're either paying a fortune or you have no reliability. Sometimes both.”
PTV: What did you hear from the parents who were able to get child care?
AB: In short, we heard that getting a spot in a daycare facility of any kind was extremely difficult because of availability. We heard from people who said that they put their children on multiple different waitlists for daycare before they were even born.
One person said that people had joked to them that they should put their unborn baby on a wait list for a daycare before they even told their parents. And that reflects the data that we have, that shows that most of the census tracts in the Southern Tier are child care deserts. So put more simply that means that there's just not enough daycare for the kids who need it.
And oftentimes the care that people can get, they reported that it was pretty far away and that that was stressful for them and their day-to-day routine. I think another factor that showed up a lot is that people described how, once they got care, that it was costing tens of thousands of dollars. That left some families in a financial bind that has forced them to make some pretty tough decisions.
PTV: What kinds of decisions?
AB: We got a couple of responses about parents deciding to leave the workforce or cutting down their hours, and some said that wasn't a decision that they made lightly. One mom told us she left a job she'd been working at for 12 years to take care of her two kids. She said that when she had both kids in care, it cost more than her family's mortgage. Others said that they cut down their hours or switched to remote work to make care decisions work.
PTV: Wow. So is there any story from all of this that really stuck with you that you heard from people in this survey?
AB: One comment that really stuck out to me was from a Chenango County mom. She described at one point her family couldn't find child care, so she and her husband were considering having one person leave the workforce.
And the thing that stood out to me is that she said many people assumed that she was going to be the one to leave the workforce. Which was really upsetting to her, she described it as “maddening,” actually.
So I think it's important to contextualize this experience and the impacts that a lack of child care can have on women, specifically, with some of the stats that we have. Overwhelmingly, even though there are more stay-at-home dads than there have ever been before, it's still moms who end up leaving the workforce. Only one in five stay-at-home parents are dads. And there's a large financial impact throughout a person's lifetime on parents who leave the workforce, even if they eventually go back.
PTV: Well, thank you so much, Aurora. Thank you to everyone who responded to this survey. To see more of Aurora Barry's coverage of this issue and all of the wonderful work from our reporters out in the field at WSKG, head to WSKG.org.
