The 2024 Louisiana Child Care Parent Poll, conducted by the Louisiana Policy Institute for Children (LPIC)show parents are struggling with cost and availability to child care.. Director of Policy and Research Mattilyn Batson highlights the struggles parents face balancing work with childcare access and affordability.
“Childcare is super expensive. So they are caught in the middle between knowing whether or not to send their children to childcare and to be in a high-quality environment where they are learning or to not work at all.”
The survey found that over half of parents worry about affording childcare, with costs averaging $633 per month per child. Batson says for those without subsidies, expenses rise to nearly 12-hundred-dollars monthly.
“And so for a family having two kids under five and they have to foot the entire bill for childcare that $28,000 a year.”
Childcare disruptions impacted employment, with 70% of parents missing work in the past three months. Batson emphasized the need for investment, warning that without action, families will face financial strain, and Louisiana’s workforce will suffer from lost economic potential.
“The reality is that what we found in our survey of over 34-hundred respondents is that the majority of them do have to work and a majority of our kids are spending time in center based early learning enters.”
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