More Than a Mortgage - By Sprinkle Family

We have been fortunate in finding a child care center we adore. Their values align with ours, their hours fit our schedule, and our children love attending! But as you can imagine, a unicorn like this comes at a price. We have three young children and last year the oldest two attended full-time and our youngest attended three days per week because there wasn’t room for him full-time. This made us a one-income family and all but $20 of one of our paychecks went to pay for child care.

Now our youngest two are in full-time care and the bill is still more than twice our mortgage! Our center does the best it can to balance paying staff without pricing families out of care. However, both of those issues are becoming larger.

This is not a sustainable system for families or providers. We see friends and families who cannot afford to work because of the cost of child care. The system needs to value early childhood education and development in the same way that primary and secondary education is valued.

We need Illinois to support families from the time a child is born.