Child Care is a Housing Issue
This piece originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s blog Housing Is A Human Right on March 13, 2026.
When we saw her a few weeks ago in eviction court, Monica’s two pre-school aged children and her third-grader were not with her. Most parents do all they can to spare their kids the grim in-person experience of a judge ordering them out of their homes.
Monica’s family demographic is enormously common among the clients we work with. The age group that experiences evictions the most? Children aged five years and younger.
That is a horrifying statistic, given what we know about the impact of evictions on children: they contribute to children’s mental illnesses, respiratory conditions, infections, delayed cognitive development, and struggles in school and social settings.
Yet kids losing their homes is an inevitable result of our U.S. policy choices. Young parents are more likely to work in sub-living wage jobs and thus have significantly lower income than other families, all while many of them sit on years-long subsidized housing waiting lists.
Photo property of USDA
Along with low wages and housing costs, we can add another burden on to the shoulders of Monica and other parents of young children: the spiraling cost of child care.
As Monica can tell you, making ends meet each month is a brutal zero-sum game. When she and other young parents struggle to pay their rent, it is often because they spend more than they can afford on child care.
Other Nations, U.S. Proposals Show We Can Do Better
In our state of Indiana, the average cost for infant care is a whopping $16,478 per year, even though wages for child care workers are quite low. (In a sad irony, a significant number of parents we see facing eviction are professional child care providers themselves.) As the New York Times reported last month, the average price for child care is higher than in-state college tuition.
Some low-income families get child care vouchers from the Child Care Development Fund. But in our state and many others, the number of vouchers and their reimbursement rates have both dropped, leaving tens of thousands of children on waiting lists.
Compare that to other nations with similar resources to the United States. They combine lengthy paid parental leave with universal preschool and after-school care. They prove that we can do far better for our children and their families.
The Roosevelt Institute has proposed the U.S. emulate the many nations that provide not just free early childhood care and education, but also living wages to child care providers.
There are many reasons why this is a good idea. High-quality child care boosts kids’ chances of leading healthy and productive lives. It allows parents to be in the workforce. And it prevents the abuse that too often happens when desperate parents are forced to leave their kids in sketchy arrangements.
Keeping families housed belongs on that list, too, as Monica and way too many of our clients can tell us.
