Screenshot: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

In the search for child care, many mothers end up making disappointing tradeoffs.

To better understand what parents face, the Federal Reserve Bank took a closer look at the challenges and released the findings in a new issue brief, “Child care tradeoffs among Massachusetts mothers.”

“Between October 2019 and January 2020, we interviewed 67 mothers in Massachusetts whose children had not yet started kindergarten,” the brief explains. It was written by Sarah Savage, a senior policy analyst and advisor at the Boston Fed, and Wendy Robeson, senior research scientist with the Work, Families, and Children Research Group at the Wellesley Centers for Women.

What Savage and Robeson heard from the mothers they interviewed were the many ways that child care tradeoffs have an economic impact. (Dads were invited to participate in these interviews, but all the responses came from moms.) This is pre-Covid research that shows how tough it was to find child care in normal times. Now in the midst of the pandemic, these challenges continue, and some have grown worse.

“This study reveals that an inadvertent effect of a mostly private market of child care is that it requires parents of young children to compromise and in some cases sacrifice what they need to achieve and maintain economic security, let alone advance it, with consequences for their children’s development,” the brief explains.

Specifically, as one mom who is a “white, above-median-income, college-educated married mother of two” says, she “did not expect to leave the workforce when her family relocated to the state of MA,” the brief says. She explains:

“When we moved out here, we moved out with the idea I’d be working. That played into our decision to move. Financially, we made the decision to have two incomes. So, when we couldn’t find child care in our price range, we took a big financial hit and had to rework our finances for me to stay at home.”

A Mom of two who is white, below-median-income, and divorced “shared her perceptions about possible consequences from her employer. This was a source of stress for this mother, who felt like being made an exception might have consequences.” She says:

“From my perspective it’s working out okay, but I get the sense that there’s resentment from my boss. Uncomfortable feeling—she’s made this exception for me that she’s allowing me to do this. There’s this underlying tension. I can only do the best I can. You have to always be on and more responsive to things.”

A married mother of color with two children spoke about the anxieties stirred up by her child care search, saying:

“I looked at another in [City/Town]. I heard a teacher yell at a kid, and I ran out. I thought about having someone come to our house to watch them; then my mom made me scared. You need cameras in every room. I did paperwork and was on waitlists. I’m not doing this.”

“If I didn’t find [center], I would’ve stayed home. I already know the system, so I know what to apply for. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t dropping my kid off and having anxiety. I didn’t want to drop kids off and worry about them. There’s nothing more important than they are.”

Another Mom says:

“Our timeline was short. It was rushed. So, we weren’t able to get on waitlists because we didn’t have the time to wait. That was the biggest hurdle, coupled with the money we’d be paying for what was available. Another option we considered was having one kid in one center and another in a different center, and we’d divide and conquer. It seemed, logistically, [that] it would be a lot to take on, especially when trying to navigate a new area and jobs, and then the thought was to have each kid on each other’s waitlists, so we could move them to the same place so they could be together. But it seemed like another transition after moving them across [place]. There was the potential for a lot to go wrong.”

This “white, above-median-income, married mother of two” ended up leaving the workforce.

The brief points to several ways to address these challenges, including:

• use “a tradeoffs lens to assess programs and policies by adopting a practice of investigating what parents at varying income levels need to give up to access high-quality care.”

• move “away from solving for a single problem, such as affordability, that does not address supply constraints on providers who are operating on thin margins and thus unable to charge the true cost of quality,” and

• identify “means for loosening the constraints on the supply of high-quality child care to minimize the tradeoffs parents must make, and maximize their chances for family economic security and positive child development”

The brief’s core message is simple and sound: instead of child care tradeoffs, all parents should have access to affordable, high-quality, child care opportunities.