Summer is here, and for many working parents, that means frantically trying to juggle childcare with their jobs for weeks on end. For many, professional childcare providers are either unaffordable or inaccessible, which means caregivers are forced to take time off, work around their kids or find other solutions.
The juggle is real for Meg St-Esprit, a freelance journalist based in Pittsburgh, PA, who has four children aged between four and 11.
At the end of May, she updated her email signature to let professional contacts know that due to childcare constraints, her responses would be a little slower than usual over the summer months.
The signature read: “Please note I may be slower to respond to email in the months of June, July and August due to the United States’ inability to provide affordable childcare for working mothers.”
Some folks who saw my email signature commented on it, so I wanted to share. The US is the only developed nation w/o subsidized childcare. Adding it would increase our GDP over 1 trillion dollars. Not a handout — it’s a smart decision when facing a recession and labor shortages. pic.twitter.com/iZGLMg1PJW
— Meg St-Esprit (@MegStEsprit) May 31, 2023
St-Esprit told Fortune she decided to use the signature—a screenshot of which went viral on social media—after receiving “a snippy email” from a client, who was unhappy that she hadn’t responded to a non-urgent email after around 18 hours.
“It was late, and I put it on my email signature—I just thought, I’m just going to be upfront about the fact that I have four kids,” St-Esprit told Fortune.
However, over the next couple of days, she questioned whether she should remove the new signature from the bottom of her email responses.
“I thought, maybe it’s not very professional,” she said. “But then people I was emailing for work started responding to it —they were like, ‘I love this, I’m going to steal this, this is so great.’ It just struck a chord, I think, laying it out there and saying, listen, I’m not going to be on my game all summer.”
Ahead of her kids’ school vacations, St-Esprit looked into summer camps as a possible solution for a childcare gap—but soon found that camps came with “outrageous” price tags.
“It was going to be $1,200 a week for all of my kids to go to camp,” she said. “It would not be worth it for me to work at all, it would make more sense for me to take the summer off. But then, what about my career? And what about our other bills? What’s the best solution? None of it is the best.”
Instead, St-Esprit and her husband have settled for employing college and high school-aged sitters on an ad hoc basis, and shifting their working hours around childcare needs. Grandparents and neighbors also help out when they can.
While she acknowledged that having family help, and flexibility with working hours was a “privilege,” childcare costs have undoubtedly impacted St-Esprit’s career. When her children were younger, a lack of affordable childcare forced her to “really cut [her] hours back.”
Despite having a master’s degree and a full-time position, St-Esprit took on casual shifts at her parents’ restaurant alongside some contract work as it was the only way she could remain in the workforce.
Since shining a light on unaffordable and inaccessible childcare, St-Esprit has received backlash from people online who argue their taxes should not be spent on taking care of other people’s children.
“It’s not me saying people should take care of my kids for me, it’s not that at all,” she said. “I contribute something to society, and I need help to do so because the math is not adding up. I think when you remove the drama and the screaming around it, and you just look at the financial aspects, it makes sense.”
The $122 billion-per-year problem
Accessing affordable childcare has long been a challenge for American women, but more than one in three parents has seen their childcare costs climb alongside other living costs over the past year, the 2023 New York Life Wealth Watch survey found.
According to the study, parents who pay for childcare use 26% of their household income to cover the costs.
For many well-educated women, childcare has become so unaffordable that they are opting to drop out of the workforce altogether rather than give up a quarter of their paycheck.
Earlier this year, one study estimated that a lack of sufficient childcare for infants and young children across the U.S. was depriving the economy of $122 billion per year in lost earnings, productivity, and revenue.
According to nonpartisan thinktank the Economic Policy Institute, which has researched the costs and benefits of greater federal investment in early years childcare, “sufficient investment in a high-quality system will more than pay for itself in the long run.”
Back in April, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to improve access to childcare, but its directives would be funded out of existing budget commitments, meaning the effect could be limited.
Recent data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that America has one of the most expensive childcare systems in the world for working parents.
The organization’s data also shows that among its 38 member states, the U.S. is one of the countries to invest the least in childcare for preschoolers.
The average OECD nation spends just over 0.8% of GDP on early childhood education and care – but in the U.S., that spend is worth less than 0.5% of GDP, putting the country’s investment in childcare on a par with Colombia, Costa Rica and Turkey.
Nordic countries Sweden and Iceland lead the way, spending 1.6% and 1.7% respectively on childcare. The heavy investment in childcare has helped the Nordic region gain a reputation as one of the best places in the world to have children, and has been found to boost both the economic and social welfare of its residents.