Childcare, Elder Care, and the Squeeze Nobody Budgeted For

Ask people in this district what has gotten unaffordable, and you will hear about groceries, insurance, and property taxes. Keep listening, and something else comes out, usually more quietly, often prefaced with "I don't really talk about this."

They are paying for daycare that costs about what their mortgage costs. Or they are driving to a parent's house four nights a week because the alternative is a facility they cannot afford and a waitlist they cannot skip. A growing number are doing both at once.

That is the squeeze, and it is one of the least-discussed pressures on households in Prior Lake, Jordan, Shakopee, and our townships.

Why it stays invisible

Care work does not show up cleanly in the numbers we argue about. It hides in three places.

• It hides in savings. Families do not report a crisis; they quietly stop contributing to retirement savings, or they drain what they have built.

• It hides in careers. Usually one parent -- still, most often the mother -- goes part-time or steps out entirely. The household loses income, and the labor market loses a worker, and neither shows up as a "care" statistic.

• It hides in unpaid labor. An adult child providing twenty hours a week of elder care is performing real work that no ledger anywhere records.

So we end up debating affordability while overlooking one of the largest line items in a young or middle-aged family's budget.

The rural piece people miss

There is a version of this conversation that only imagines suburban daycare centers. That version does not describe all of 54B.

In Jackson, Louisville, Sand Creek, and Spring Lake Townships, the nearest licensed provider may be a real drive, and the number of providers has been shrinking for years. In-home providers -- the backbone of rural childcare -- have been closing faster than new ones open. When a township loses its one provider, families do not shop around. They improvise, or a parent stops working.

Elder care runs the same way. Aging in place is not a preference for a lot of our farm families; it is the only option within reach, which means the care falls on family members who are also running an operation and raising kids.

What I think the state's role actually is

I want to be careful here, because this is an area where both parties like to announce big programs and then discover the money is not there.

I do not think the state can or should replace family care. I do think the state is currently making it harder than it needs to be, in ways that are fixable.

1.       Stop losing providers. Before we fund anything new, find out why in-home childcare providers keep closing and address that. Licensing burden, inspection inconsistency, and liability costs come up constantly. A provider who stays open serves more children than a grant program that arrives two years late.

2.       Fix the cliff. Assistance programs that end abruptly punish families for earning slightly more. A parent should never be financially better off by turning down a raise. That is a design flaw, and design flaws can be repaired without expanding a program's cost.

3.       Take the sandwich generation seriously as a category. Right now, childcare policy and elder care policy are written in separate rooms by people who do not talk to each other, for households that experience both bills in the same month. Respite care, caregiver tax treatment, and adult day services deserve the same attention we give to early childhood.

4.       Count rural differently. A statewide childcare average tells you almost nothing about Sand Creek Township. Access, not just cost, has to be measured -- and funded -- on its own terms.

What I will not claim

I will not tell you I can make care free, or that there is a bill that fixes this in one session. Care is expensive because it is labor-intensive, and the workers doing it are underpaid rather than overpaid. Anybody promising cheap, plentiful, high-quality care with no trade-off is selling something.

What I will say is that this district's families are absorbing a cost the state has largely declined to help with, that some of that cost is self-inflicted by clumsy program design, and that fixing clumsy design is exactly the unglamorous work I am running to do.

The honest reason this is on my list

Because it keeps coming up when I stop talking and let people talk.

Nobody opens with it. It arrives late in a conversation, after the property tax complaint and the road complaint, usually with an apology attached -- as if needing help caring for a toddler or a parent were a personal failure rather than the predictable arithmetic of an expense the size of a second mortgage landing on a household budget that has no room for it.

It is not a personal failure. And it is not a niche issue. It is a mainstream cost-of-living issue in District 54B that has been left out of the affordability conversation for too long.

If you are living in that squeeze right now -- paying for daycare, caring for a parent, or both -- I would like to hear about it. What follows is not sympathy. It is a list of things I would try to change.