Alan Montecillo [00:00:00] I’m Alan Montecillo, in for Ericka Cruz Guevarra, and welcome to The Bay. Local news to keep you rooted. A few years ago, Annie Malekzadeh was shopping at a Joanne Fabrics in Concord.
Annie Malekzadeh [00:00:16] And I had my, I think I was pregnant with my second kiddo at that time and had my older son in the shopping cart.
Alan Montecillo [00:00:25] While she was waiting for her fabric to get cut, she struck up a conversation with an older woman who was also waiting. But then the woman said something to Annie that stung her.
Annie Malekzadeh [00:00:36] She said something along the lines of, I don’t know why you would want more than two. It’s basically impossible in the Bay Area.
Alan Montecillo [00:00:44] Annie and her husband now have three children, ages eight, six, and three.
Annie Malekzadeh [00:00:50] I think back on that a lot because at the time I was like, how dare she? But now I’m like, oh, that was right. It’s really hard.
Alan Montecillo [00:01:03] Child care in America has gotten even more expensive. Between 2020 and 2024, prices shot up almost 30%. Here in the Bay Area, child care costs are higher than almost anywhere else in the country. For families with multiple young kids, it can cost more than a parent’s entire salary, which means that many mothers, like Annie, have a painful choice to make. Keep pursuing your career or take care of your child.
Annie Malekzadeh [00:01:35] I never ever planned to be a stay-at-home mom. I thought coming into motherhood that you could do it all, and that hasn’t been my experience.
Alan Montecillo [00:01:49] As part of KQED’s new series on affordability, we meet one mom in the East Bay who had to choose between her job and childcare.
Daisy Nguyen [00:02:06] Next to housing, child care is one of the biggest expenses for families.
Alan Montecillo [00:02:11] Daisy Nguyen covers early childhood education for KQED.
Daisy Nguyen [00:02:15] Almost everywhere, but in the Bay Area, prices are just really high. And there are a couple of different reasons for that. Child care is labor-intensive. Little babies need constant care, and if you want good, high-quality care, you need to have trained workers. You need a safe space where children receive the care. Insurance, utilities, food, maybe supplies to, you know, to provide proper care. And that’s, and you know those costs have gone up too. So they’ve had to raise their tuition. What it means is that the cost to provide care is more than what parents can afford.
Alan Montecillo [00:03:09] So for this story, you talk to a few different parents who are navigating this world of expensive childcare, having to make trade-offs. One of them is a woman named Annie. Tell me a bit about her.
Daisy Nguyen [00:03:27] I went to Diablo Valley College and I met Annie Malekzadeh because I wanted to talk to her about how she, as a parent, is making things work with child care in the Bay Area.
Annie Malekzadeh [00:03:39] Making friends with other moms is essential. If you’re going to be five minutes late to pick up, like you have to have someone else that you can text be like, can you grab my kid for me real quick? I’ll be a couple minutes late, but I’ll be there.
Daisy Nguyen [00:03:53] She lives in Pleasant Hill and she’s a mom of three kids under the age of eight. They’re about two and a half years apart, her kids. She’s a part-time student at Diablo Valley College. She’s pursuing a master’s degree in math and before that she was a middle school math teacher.
Annie Malekzadeh [00:04:11] That was my plan and I didn’t ever expect to deviate from that.
Daisy Nguyen [00:04:16] She really enjoys being a teacher. She’s from a family of teachers. Her grandparents were teachers. She really saw that was her career. When she had two kids, child care costs were still manageable. She was still working part time. And with her husband’s income as a psychiatrist, child care cost were manageable. But when she had her third child, that’s when everything changed.
Annie Malekzadeh [00:04:43] I feel very fortunate that I, you know, got through having our second kid and didn’t feel done. And instead of living with the potential of like regretting it for the rest of my life, I was able to say, hey, can we have another one? Can we like, work that into the budget?
Daisy Nguyen [00:05:01] The total amount shot up to $56,000 a year. She was earning $32,000 dollars a year with her part-time job.
Annie Malekzadeh [00:05:11] We wanted to find a child care location that was licensed. If your baby is going to spend the majority of their day with a caregiver, you want to make sure that that caregiver is trained and able to do a really great job and that unfortunately costs more.
Daisy Nguyen [00:05:32] And that was like double her part-time salary because she was only working like 25 hours per week. It was just particularly painful to see how much she was paying.
Annie Malekzadeh [00:05:42] When we ran the numbers for the child care for all three of them for before and after care and preschool and my youngest would have still been in infant care it was still $1,182 per week.
Alan Montecillo [00:05:57] Yeah, and I imagine, I mean, it’s not like it was breaking news to her that child care is expensive, but with her first two children, it seems like she was able to make it work with working part-time and a career she’s passionate about, but it seems with this, even with her husband’s salary, it just didn’t seem sustainable.
Daisy Nguyen [00:06:14] Yeah, she said it was just causing them a lot of stress. So yeah, that led to her just deciding at the end of the school year to quit her job.
Annie Malekzadeh [00:06:24] I loved it. I hate leaving. My grandparents were both educators. My grandfather was an art teacher and my grandma was an elementary school teacher in Ventura. They were beloved by their community and they were really excited when I chose to become a teacher.
Daisy Nguyen [00:06:41] There are lots of trade-offs. I mean, besides the biggest one that Annie is making, other trade-off, she said that she’s just really had to take a close look at her budget.
Annie Malekzadeh [00:06:55] My husband was like really hanging on to the cable and I was like we don’t watch it we can’t.
Daisy Nguyen [00:07:01] She shops at Costco because the grocery shopping is quite expensive. Buying in bulk is usually cheaper.
Annie Malekzadeh [00:07:09] I started tutoring on the side so that helps just a little bit.
Daisy Nguyen [00:07:13] And she’s cutting out whatever she can to trim her budget each month to make it work.
Alan Montecillo [00:07:41] How typical is a story like this? Have you heard similar things from other families?
Daisy Nguyen [00:07:47] Yeah, like a couple of months ago, we did this survey, and we got at least 40 responses from many families. Usually these are couples who said that it’s one person in the partnership had to take a step back from the career, give up career opportunities, or just work less or quit so that they could afford child care. Statewide I think it’s also an issue like the Stanford Center on Early Childhood had conducted a survey of California parents with children under the age of six and they found that three and four families with young children reported difficulty meeting one or more basic needs so child care health care housing food utilities like three and four that’s a significant number.
Alan Montecillo [00:08:43] So it sounds like Annie’s story is part of a broader trend, but within a partnership, who tends to be the most impacted by this?
Daisy Nguyen [00:08:52] In Annie’s situation, she made it clear that her husband made way more money than her. And so the default went to her, the mom, because she needed to have more flexibility to be there for her children.
Annie Malekzadeh [00:09:06] A lot of parenting default goes to mom a lot of the time. Not all the time, but a lot at the time!
Daisy Nguyen [00:09:15] In a lot of the partnerships, it’s the women who earn less. And so they’re usually the ones who have to make some sort of sacrifice with their career. Most experts say that when women take time away from the workforce, it means they’ll have to work longer into their retirement to make up for their time away. I cited in my story a study by KPMG, the financial firm, which found that after the pandemic. There was a spike in the number of college-educated women with young children who left the workforce. Whereas for dads of young children, their workforce participation continued to increase.
Alan Montecillo [00:10:05] And that accelerated post-COVID because of.
Daisy Nguyen [00:10:07] A couple of reasons, there’s just an increasing shortage of available child care because the workforce has really suffered since the pandemic. The second reason is the return to office policy.
Alan Montecillo [00:10:21] Less flexibility.
Daisy Nguyen [00:10:22] Less flexibility, correct.
Alan Montecillo [00:10:24] I want to come back to Annie for a little bit, Daisy. So faced with the prospect of being $56,000 a year for childcare, she ultimately decides to leave her job as a teacher. So how did that decision affect her family?
Daisy Nguyen [00:10:42] Right now it’s saving her $600 a month. As her kids have gotten older, like two of them are now in public elementary school. So that’s already as savings. And then her youngest is still in preschool. He’s now three. But having him in full-time preschool is giving her an opportunity to do something else. She decided to enroll in Diablo Valley College.
Annie Malekzadeh [00:11:11] I’m wanting to pursue a second master’s degree at this point. I’m hoping for a career in statistics.
Daisy Nguyen[00:11:19] Hopefully she can find a higher paying job to make up for this time that she’s spending away from the labor market.
Alan Montecillo [00:11:28] Daisy, this KQED series is about affordability, about the trade-offs that people all across the region make every single day to make it work. But policy-wise, is there any help on the way for people like Annie?
Daisy Nguyen [00:11:41] A lot of states are, you know, recognizing this is an issue. New Mexico is offering free child care that the governor there said it might save families an average of $12,000 annually. Vermont passed a payroll tax to raise money to provide some financial assistance for child care. And cities like New York and San Francisco are expanding access to free or subsidized child care to income-eligible families. So what’s next in California is really trying to figure out how can the state increase access for infant to three-year-old care, because that’s really what’s–
Alan Montecillo [00:12:24] That’s Annie’s situation.
Daisy Nguyen [00:12:25] Yeah, it’s definitely Annie’s situation You know, when parents have to take a step back or walk away from the workforce to take care of children, it has a ripple effect on the broader economy.
Annie Malekzadeh [00:12:45] Both parents to be in the workforce, you know, something needs to happen.
Daisy Nguyen [00:12:51] She left the classroom. There were students who were relying on her to learn their math. So I think that we can think about the ripple effects in so many ways.
