'The Hell Of American Day Care': Expensive And 'Mediocre'

TERRY GROSS FRESH AIR

In his cover story for the April 29 issue of The New Republic, "The Hell of American Day Care," Jonathan Cohn writes that "trusting your child with someone else is one of the hardest things a parent has to do — and in the U.S., it's harder still, because American day care is a mess. And about 40 percent of children under 5 spend at least part of their week in the care of somebody other than a parent."

Cohn's article examines how we ended up with a day care system that is barely regulated and sometimes unsafe. It's a system that is difficult for many working parents to afford, yet offers many of its workers a barely livable income.
"One of the tragedies of the situation," Cohn tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, "is that parents need these day cares to work, to make a living. You're talking about single parents a lot of the time. You're talking about families that aren't making a lot of money. They desperately need someone to watch the kids or they're not going to be able to make it, and there are just not a lot of options out there."
Child care in the country can cost anywhere from $4,000 to $15,000 per year, depending on the region and quality of the care. But across the board, Cohn calls the quality "mediocre at best."
"There is a small percentage of day care that is very good," he says, "but there is an equally small percentage that is really, really bad — as in actually hazardous to children's health."

Cohn, who is the author of the 2007 book Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis and the People who Pay the Price and a parent of two kids himself, says part of the problem is that we're not thinking of child care as something that requires professional responsibility.
"We're not thinking about, 'Wow, we have this need out there. We need trained professionals to help fill it,' " he says. "We're thinking, 'Oh yeah, someone's got to watch the kids. Let's pay 'em like baby sitters."

The result, says Cohn, is the worst of both worlds: Parents have to spend a lot of money to send their kids to day care, and at the same time the average salary of a day care worker is $19,430 a year, which is "less than a parking lot attendant or janitor."
This creates a huge tension. "On the one hand," says Cohn, "improving the quality of child care in this country is going to take more money. On the other hand, it already costs more than many families can pay individually."