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Economic troubles are playing out one family at a time at the New Horizons Learning Center in this struggling city two hours northwest of Chicago.
Some parents have been laid off and must pull their children out of the daycare centre until they can find a job. Others' employment hours have been cut, so they reduce their kids' attendance to a few days a week.
Financial strains prompt one mother to pay with a postdated cheque. Another chooses to work in the middle of the night &em; after putting her kids to bed &em; because of the extra dollar per hour that shift brings. And the stress shows on the faces of the children who can't understand why their friends, without explanation, stop coming.
"They act out more, cry a lot more," said Diane Kesterton, director of New Horizons, where a 38-child enrolment has been halved to 19 in just three months. "They don't know what's happening; they're confused."
Parents across the United States are telling daycare providers they must scale back or abandon their services. Instead, they keep kids at home with grandparents or upend their work-life balance because gas and food prices have become prohibitive and average child-care costs outpace rent and mortgage payments &em; even for those drawing salaries.
"I was paying more in daycare than I was making in work," Meredith Hartigan, a Rockford single mother of two, said in explaining her decision to pull her four-year-old daughter out of daycare in August and switch to working nights and weekends.
Hartigan said her $38,000 office-job salary couldn't cover her bills and $6,900 in annual daycare costs.
To make matters worse, Hartigan's ex-husband's salary as a roofer is set to plummet as it does every winter &em; and she's increasingly concerned his business won't pick up next spring as it has in years past.
Child-care providers have similar fears as centres that have had waiting lists for as long as anyone can remember now find themselves scrambling for children. Many are for the first time offering part-time services or changing hours to accommodate the growing number of parents working off shifts or struggling to make ends meet.
"It is not about people making choices to drive a second car," said Diane Stout, executive director of Circles of Learning, also in Rockford. "For many low-income people it is making a choice for food."
Diana Ochoa, a 27-year-old who lives with her sons, aged four and six, at her parents' house in Rockford, said &em; even after a sharp decline in gasoline prices &em; she can only afford to fill her tank enough to bring her youngest boy, Kenneth, to New Horizons three days a week.
And when she can't afford child care, Ochoa stays awake through the day to care for her youngest son at least until her parents come home from work.
It's not just low-wage earners feeling the pinch. Daycare costs average between $3,380 to $10,787 a year for just one preschooler, according to the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies.
Even before this year's economic perils, the cost had climbed 5.2 per cent between 2006 and 2007, said Linda Smith, the association's executive director. And in every state in the country, the monthly child-care bill for two children is higher than median rent payments and as high or higher than a mortgage.
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When not having child care isn't an option, some fear financially strapped parents will put their kids in facilities or homes that are little more than waiting rooms.
"We are driving people into an unregulated system," said Peggy Liuzzi, executive director of Child Care Solutions, a resource and referral agency in Syracuse, N.Y.
Smith agreed, saying she expects even people who now qualify for aid from the state to not even bother applying.
"If you know there are 207,000 people on the waiting list in California, you probably aren't even going to get on the waiting list," she said. "Why fill out all the paperwork?"
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- reprinted from the Associated Press