I’m a 38-year-old college graduate and mother. I serve in an executive leadership role supporting adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. My husband, a 37-year-old wartime military veteran, works in a civilian position. We’re educated. We’ve built stable careers. We both work full time.
We’re not who most people might picture when they think of families struggling to afford child care that enables us to pursue careers and build a secure future for us and our 2- and 3-year-old daughters.
But we are.
New Jersey offers subsidies to help pay for child care, but the income cutoff is among the lowest in the nation. We earn too much for a subsidy and too little for child care to feel affordable.
Child care is by far our family’s largest monthly expense.
The math is stark: Rent is $2,700. Child care is $3,200. That comes to $70,800 a year for a roof over our heads and a safe, nurturing place for our daughters while we work.
The strain deepens for families, like ours, with a child who requires early intervention therapies developmental delays. These critical services often require added coordination, time and out-of-pocket expense. Even with New Jersey’s sliding-scale copayments, many working families still face a significant financial burden.
When you think about it, we work to afford child care.
Not a luxury
For us and thousands more New Jersey families, that reality means constant trade-offs. It means questioning whether career advancement makes sense. It means knowing that one unexpected expense could erase what little financial margin we have.
It also means watching talented women — leaders and professionals — step back from careers because the math simply doesn’t work.
Child care isn’t a luxury. It isn’t optional. But for many families, it isn’t affordable, either.
That’s why I went to Trenton to share my family’s story for the release of “Blueprint for Affordable Child Care: New Jersey Doesn’t Work Without It,” a report from Start Strong NJ, a statewide advocacy group.
“The pressures on families are enormous,” the report states. “Simply put, there never seems to be enough time — and everything costs more than it used to.”
You don’t have to tell me!
We’re all paying
The research underscores what many families know: Child care is not just a personal challenge. It is an economic issue affecting workforce participation, business productivity and the state’s long-term growth. When parents can’t find or afford care, the entire economy feels the impact.
In response, the report outlines a path forward built on three principles:
- Make child care affordable and accessible for every family that needs it. In a functional system, families could secure high-quality care without sacrificing financial stability or facing impossible choices — regardless of income, geography or work schedules.
- Compensate and support early childhood educators as the professionals they are. The people who nurture children during their most critical years of development should earn wages that reflect their expertise, responsibility and value to society. Today, too many make poverty-level wages, which destabilizes the very system families rely on.
- Recognize and fund child care as essential economic infrastructure. Child care isn’t a private convenience. It’s as fundamental to a functioning economy as transportation, schools and utilities, and it requires sustained public investment as a public good.
When child care is stable, families are stable. When it isn’t, everything becomes fragile — even for families who work hard and do everything they can to make it work.
New Jersey’s future depends on whether families like mine can stay in the workforce, raise our children in safe environments and build secure lives. We can’t wait much longer to fix a system that so many families depend on and without which our economy can’t function.
