| The cost of day care in the US is soaring, and it's become a drag on the number of women in the workforce, Stacey Vanek Smith writes in today's newsletter. Plus: Wall Street is so pumped for Donald Trump's presidency, and the NBA's Jaylen Brown gets in the sneaker game. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. First comes the baby, then comes the bill. And right now, the bills are growing almost as fast as the babies. The cost of day care and preschool in the US has jumped more than 25% since 2019, leaving many working parents to make an impossible calculation. "The costs are unreal," says Amber Lord, 39, who gave birth to her son, Henry, last year. Lord loved her job in marketing and planned to continue working after her son was born. As she visited day cares near her home in Virginia Beach, she began to panic: They were all charging around $25,000 a year for four-days-a-week care that didn't fully cover working hours. Lord's husband had a good job and was the family's biggest earner. As the couple ran the numbers, it became clear that if Lord was going to also work full time, it was going to cost a small fortune. "We were like, 'We can't make this make sense,'" she recalls. "It was going to cost like 80% of my monthly pay." Lord's husband offered to take a second job, but Lord says that didn't feel right to her. She asked her boss if she could go part time, but her boss refused. Lord realized she was going to have to leave a job she loved, in a career she'd spent almost two decades building. "I came home from work and just sat there in my empty house, crying and pregnant, thinking, 'There's no village. There is no village. I live in a country where they don't care.'" Lord's experience seems to be emerging as a national trend: As child care costs have soared, federal help for parents has tapered off. Last year, tens of billions of dollars in child care subsidies put in place during the pandemic expired.  Employers are pulling back on more flexible work arrangements. Photographer: Getty Images That one-two punch appears to be pushing some mothers out of the workforce. Lauren Bauer, an economist and fellow at the Brookings Institution, has been tracking the data and found that the share of mothers with children under 5 who are working has fallen from 70% to 68% in the past 18 months. That's tens of thousands of mothers who've dropped out of the workforce in just the past year and a half. "There are women who would like to participate in the workforce, who now no longer have as much of a choice," Bauer says. There could be other causes of this decline, she says, but it does mark the reversal of a trend that had seen women and mothers coming into the workforce in record numbers. Bauer credits a mix of factors for that increase: schools reopening after Covid-19-related restrictions, federal subsidies rolling in, the job market taking off and employers becoming more flexible about work arrangements. "And right now we are seeing all of those things dissipate." A study out this year from LendingTree found that having two children in day care was significantly more expensive than rent in cities across the US, averaging almost $15,000 per year, per child. "You're asking young families to spend a college tuition to have their child taken care of," Bauer says. Even for couples who have savings, like Lord and her husband, it often isn't enough. After Lord left her job, she tried to build a marketing business from home as she cared for her newborn. She also began posting on social media about her experience and was shocked at the thousands of responses that poured in from mothers across the country. "Most of them said they had to leave their job because they couldn't afford day care any longer," Lord says. Other women told her they left their children with caregivers they didn't entirely trust. "It was moms from every economic background," she says. Harvard economist and Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin has concluded, from decades of research on the topic, that helping pay for child care is the single most impactful thing governments can do to help working women. "Every country that has highly subsidized child care has pretty high levels" of women in the workforce, she says. "That's clear." Goldin cites Sweden, France and Canada as countries that have seen the number of mothers in the workforce rise as child care costs have come down through government subsidies. Lord says, in spite of her mixed emotions, she's truly loved staying home with her son. She's also managed to build a thriving marketing business from home. After hearing so many stories from mothers across the country, she encourages all stay-at-home moms to find some way to keep working. "I'm like, 'I don't care how much you trust someone or love someone. People change and situations change.' I want women to be more prepared and more secure, and just feel safer, not only as women, but as mothers." Lord does sometimes think about how her life might look different in a world with more affordable child care. "We just spend every waking moment together, face-to-face. And it's great. I love him to pieces. He's the best thing that's ever happened to me," she says. "But yeah, if we could put him in day care for a little bit, I would absolutely do that." | 
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