The cost of providing child care benefits to employees — like stipends and onsite day care — is an investment with outsized returns, finds an intriguing new study from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and nonprofit Moms First.
Why it matters: The increasing cost of child care in the U.S., along with a shortage of providers, keeps parents out of the workforce — a drag on the economy overall and a hit to employers in a tight labor market.
The big picture: These benefits are gaining more attention, particularly in the wake of the pullback of pandemic-era child care funding — but they’re still pretty rare.
- 12% of workers in the U.S. have access to child care benefits from an employer — a number that falls to 6% for part-timers and those in the lowest income quartile, per BCG.
- Yet those are the workers who typically lose out on pay because of a child care emergency.
What they found: For every $1 spent on child care benefits, employers saw a net gain of between $0.90 and $4.25 through reduced absenteeism, less lateness, and lower rates of attrition.
- The study debunks the idea that child care is a cost center. “These benefits pay for themselves,” the authors write.
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One would think that Republicans would jump at the chance for child care payments to help mothers go to work. After all, they would pay taxes, pay into social security, and pay into Medicare! What could be better than that to those who always look at the dollar amount rather than the good it can do?
Remember when the child care act was used in the early stages of COVID, child poverty dropped by 50%! That’s amazing and Republicans should wake up that it’s more needed now than ever, given their dire predictions on how long social security will last, their attempts to get rid of the ACA and other concerns. It would be one of the greatest services they could do to support child care. Terri Quint