HOW THE U.S. ALMOST HAD UNIVERSAL CHILD CARE

HOW THE U.S. ALMOST HAD UNIVERSAL CHILD CARE 

This high cost often ends up being close to or more than the take-home pay of many parents, and thanks to the persistent gender pay gap, that parent is most often the mom. This means that more women are quitting their jobs or scaling back their hours after they have children. On average, professional women lose around $11,000 a year, thanks to the gender pay gap, which is also the average annual cost of child care in the U.S., and after decades of decline and a drop to 23% in 1999, the share of stay-at-home mothers rose to 29% in 2012.