Journal / Essay

The Math of Childcare

The first piece in this journal started counting at twelve years of school. This is what happens in the years before that — the ones that cost more than college in most of the country, and aren't optional if both parents need to work.

And Then You're Dead · August 2026 · 6 min read

The twelve years of compulsory school in the first piece in this journal start around age five or six. Most working parents need coverage well before that — and unlike school, none of it is free.

Before School Even Starts

Center-based care for one child now runs about $15,000 a year nationally. Infant care costs more, because the staffing ratios are tighter and the margin for error is smaller.

That's before a second child, and most families with young children have more than one in care at the same time — infant and toddler tuition, running simultaneously, on the same household budget.

What "Affordable" Is Supposed to Mean

The federal government has an actual definition of affordable childcare: 7% or less of a household's income. It's a useful number mainly for showing how far from it real families land.

For single parents, one child's care eats 35% of median household income. Not a typo. Just a different kind of rent.

More Than College

This is the comparison that tends to stop people: in 38 states and Washington, D.C., a year of childcare costs more than a year of public college tuition.

College tuition is a cost most families see coming for eighteen years and can plan around. Childcare shows up the moment parental leave ends, with none of that runway, at prices set by a market with too few providers and no real ceiling.

The Choice That Isn't Really a Choice

When the math doesn't work, someone stops working. It is overwhelmingly not the higher earner.

Economists estimate childcare problems cost workers somewhere between $15 billion and $44 billion in lost wages a year. That's not spending — it's income that was never earned in the first place, because the cost of earning it required paying more than the job itself was worth.

And Then You're Dead

Before the twelve years of school. Before the four years of college. Before any of the debt that funds it. There are a handful of years that cost more than the degree eventually will, billed weekly, to parents who mostly can't defer it, refinance it, or wait for scholarships. It's the first bill in a life full of them. That's the plan. That's the math.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

Read the first piece · or see every essay