Examining the high cost of childcare in the U.S. and the financial struggles faced by American families.

The High Cost of Childcare

Discussing the lack of comprehensive policies and the financial challenges faced by families in making ends meet.

Policy Challenges and Family Struggles

Exploring the financial burden of raising children, the impact on families, and the disparities across racial groups.

Financial Burden and Impact on Families

Analyzing the rising childcare costs, economic implications, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on families.

Childcare Costs and Economic Impact

Examining the child tax credit, its temporary expansion, and the impact on reducing child poverty.

Family Support Policies

Addressing the challenges of paid family leave, disparities in access, and the need for federal support.

Challenges of Paid Family Leave

Highlighting the need for federal investment in universal and affordable childcare programs.

Need for Universal Childcare

Proposing a rebalancing of federal investments toward children for affordability and long-term economic impact.

Rebalancing Federal Investments

# The Cost of Raising Children in the U.S.

## Introduction
As an expert SEO writer, I have transcribed a video that sheds light on the challenges of raising children in the U.S. The high cost of childcare and the lack of comprehensive family policies have put a strain on American families, especially those living in expensive areas like the Bay Area. In this newsletter, we will explore the impact of these challenges and the potential policies that could help alleviate the burden on American families.

## The High Cost of Childcare
- Childcare in the U.S. is more expensive than in-state public tuition, making it a significant financial burden for many families.
- The average family with at least 1 child under the age of 5 typically spends around 13 percent of the family's income on childcare, exceeding the government's affordability threshold for low-income families.
- Childcare costs have outpaced inflation, making it increasingly unaffordable for families, especially those from marginalized communities.

## The Impact on Families
- Many families, including middle-class ones, are living paycheck to paycheck to afford rent and childcare.
- The lack of comprehensive family policies and social safety nets has left families struggling to make ends meet.
- The high cost of childcare has widened the racial economic disparities, with black and Latino families bearing a disproportionate burden.

## Potential Solutions
- The Child Tax Credit, which was temporarily expanded during the pandemic, has shown promising results in reducing child poverty and supporting families.
- Paid family leave and subsidized childcare are advocated as essential policies to provide financial relief and support for parents.
- The federal government's willingness to invest in care infrastructures is crucial to achieving universality and affordability in childcare.

## The Build Back Better Bill
- President Biden's proposed Build Back Better infrastructure bill aimed to address the challenges of childcare, paid leave, and family support programs.
- The bill faced opposition from key Democrat Senator Joe Manchin, highlighting the challenges of enacting comprehensive family policies at the federal level.

## Investing in Children
- Rebalancing federal investments toward children has the potential to make raising a child more affordable and provide sufficient resources for families.
- Investing in children has a multiplier effect, benefiting families, children in adulthood, and the entire economy.

In conclusion, the high cost of raising children in the U.S. is a pressing issue that requires comprehensive and sustainable solutions. By investing in childcare, paid leave, and family support programs, the government can alleviate the financial burden on American families and create a more equitable society for all. Thank you for reading.

Sincerely,
[Your Name]

"Addressing the High Cost of Raising Children in the U.S."

- Raising a child in the U.S. is very expensive
- Childcare costs can be higher than in-state public tuition
- Many families struggle to make ends meet, even middle-class families
- The average family spends around 13% of their income on childcare
- The child tax credit was temporarily expanded during the pandemic, but has now reverted to pre-pandemic levels
- Paid family leave is not widely available in the U.S., especially for low-income and minority families

- Each state with paid family and medical leave has different laws
- Typically, employers must provide up to 12 weeks of fully or partially paid leave
- Programs are funded by payroll taxes and sometimes employer contributions
- There are issues with the patchwork child care system in the U.S.
- President Biden proposed the Build Back Better bill to address these issues
- Rebalancing federal investments towards children can have a positive impact on the economy and families

Raising children is expensive in the United States, and families are feeling the pressure. The U.S. Department of Agriculture published a report using 2015 data that estimated child-rearing expenses from birth through age 17 in a two-child, middle-income, married-couple family is $233,610. With inflation, that number translates to almost $286,000 in 2022. According to economists, the current policies in place meant to help families are not doing enough. Here’s why it’s so expensive to raise children in the U.S. and some of the policies the U.S. government could implement to help.

Chapters:
0:00 - Introduction
1:42 - How much children cost
5:42 - Child Tax Credit
8:36 - Childcare and paid family leave
11:18 - Solutions

Raising children is expensive in the United States, and families are feeling the pressure.

More than 12.5 million children in the U.S. live in poverty. Even middle-class families are increasingly struggling to pay for everyday expenses.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture published a report using 2015 data that estimated expenses of child rearing from birth through age 17 in a middle-income family of two adults and two children is $233,610. With inflation, that number translates to almost $286,000 in 2022.

But adjusting for inflation may not be enough. … Child care costs have actually outpaced inflation. In 2020, child care expenses rose 5.03% year over year compared to the annual inflation rate of just 1.2% at the time.

“The fact is that sending an infant to day care in many places across the country could be significantly more expensive than in-state public tuition to send them to college,” said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

“The United States has just been very reluctant, very conservative, when it comes to these kinds of family policies,” said Shawn Fremstad, senior fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

“One of the issues with child care in the U.S. is it’s a patchwork system,” said Lauren Bauer, an economic studies fellow at Brookings Institution. “We have programs that fully subsidized for eligible children. ... We have tax credits that subsidize a portion of child care costs for higher-income families. We also have block grants to states to help them expand access. The problem with all of these systems is that, with this multitude of approaches, we’re not getting close to universality or affordability.”

Here’s why it’s so expensive to raise children in the U.S., with an explanation of some of the policies the federal government could implement to help families struggling to make ends meet.

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#cnbc 
How Much It Actually Costs To Raise Kids In The U.S.

It's very expensive to raise a child in the U.S.

I didn't know it was going to be that expensive.

The free market works well in many different sectors, but childcare is not

Sending an infant to daycare in many places across the country is actually more expensive than in-state public tuition to send them to college.

When we looked it up, it turned out our daughter's daycare was more than Stanford's tuition.

We didn't really start to dig into it until we had a baby and I was on maternity leave and then the numbers really started to hit home and it was like, how are we going to do this?

Many Americans are struggling to make ends meet.

More than 12.5 million children in the U.S.

Even middle-class families are increasingly struggling to pay for everyday expenses.

We were living paycheck to paycheck every month to pay rent in the Bay Area and pay for child care.

In this country, we don't have comprehensive policies.

And so that means we are working with piecemeal programs to try to help people make ends

I think the United States has just been very reluctant, very conservative when it comes to these kind of family policies.

Improving the social safety net, lowering the overall cost of raising children in this country is both the right thing to do for American families and a smart thing to do for our entire American economy.

The fundamental issue is not that we don't know what to do.

The way to get to stability is making sure families have sufficient resources and sufficient time.

If we know what to do, how do we pay for it?

Here's why it's so expensive to raise kids in the U.S.

I am a mother of 2 children, a four-year-old and a two-year-old.

I recently just had my first kid, my daughter Alma.

Basically, I've been on paternity leave for the last 8 weeks, so I'm halfway through.

Everything is very expensive in New Jersey.

People always warn you like there's going to be a ton of stuff they need to buy for the baby whether it comes with diapers or wipes and we didn't necessarily understand how much we have to buy.

If we had had 2 kids in full-time daycare it would have been a lot more than rent.

So that's why it just absolutely wasn't an option.

And when we looked at the numbers for full time nannies in the San Francisco area, they all charge about 80 grand a year.

We don't have concrete plans of what we're going to do with child care because we know that child care can range anywhere from a thousand dollars a month or somewhere could be like as paying as like a double rent.

The average family with at least 1 child under the age of 5 typically spends around 13 percent of the family's income on child care according to a September 2021 Treasury Department report.

That's more than what the average household spends on groceries and nearly double what the government considers affordable for low-income families.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the median black family with 2 kids was spending roughly 56% of their annual income on childcare, a bigger share than any other racial group.

And of course, we know during COVID, for all families, childcare centers and school closures were forcing parents to pay for childcare in ways that they never had had to before.

For over 20 years, the Economic Policy Institute has produced something called the Family Budget Calculator.

And in that we look at basic expenses across the country.

Housing, child care if you have kids, health care, transportation, food, other incidentals like household items, and your taxes.

1 of the things we noticed when we were doing this about 4 or 5 years ago is that childcare became more expensive than rent in many places across the country.

The most recent report released by the Department of Agriculture in 2015 estimated that for a middle-income household with 2 parents and 2 children, it would cost more than $233,600 to raise a child from birth through age 17.

With inflation, that number translates to almost $286,000 in 2022.

The report calculated it would cost the hypothetical family of 4 anywhere from $9,330 to $23,380 per child in 1 year.

This range depends on the age of the child and income of the parents.

Adjusting for inflation, that range in 2022 would be between about $11,400 and $28,600.

But adjusting for inflation may not be enough.

Child care costs have actually outpaced inflation.

Child care prices surpassed annual inflation by nearly 4 percentage points in 2020.

And that was before the worst of the pandemic inflation woes.

And that data is based on middle class, 2 parent households.

Just think about what that cost looks like when we're talking about single parents, or if we're talking about families of color on the struggling end of the racial wealth gap in this country.

I'd say we're middle-class for the area we're living in.

I actually am not sure how some people get by living in the Bay Area that make less than my husband and I do.

We cannot wait until next year because 1 of our children is going to public school next year and we might finally be able to start saving some money again.

Families that are right on the poverty line on average, if they're white in this country, have $18,000 of net worth.

the poverty line, if they're black in this country, on average have at or below $0 in net worth.

Just think about what that $18,000 difference means to parents when their second grader falls off the monkey bars and they're facing unanticipated medical costs.

Policymakers acted very swiftly in the pandemic and enacted policies that had tangible, positive results for workers and their families.

We do a lot of family supports through the tax code and sort of the most prominent example here is something called the child tax credit.

The child tax credit allows parents to deduct a certain amount of money from their taxes at the end of each year.

That amount depends on several factors, household income, how many children someone has, and the age of the children.

The Child Tax Credit, enacted in 1997 with broad bipartisan support, was enacted in response to slow wage growth, higher cost of living, and a growing tax burden for average households.

It was enacted to help reduce the tax burden on families with children, to help reduce the cost of raising kids.

Congress temporarily expanded the policy during the pandemic.

The tax credit was raised to $3,000 a year for children between 6 and 17 years old and jumped to $3,600 a year for children 5 and under.

And for at least half of the year, it was paid out monthly.

So both a kind of substantial boost in value and this monthly payment.

So you're not waiting till the end of, you know, when you file taxes the next year to get it.

And that provided a solid safety net to try to help familie ends meet during those tu reduce hunger in families of those kinds of programs.

In 2021 alone, the expanded child tax credit was estimated to lift 4.1 million children above the poverty line, and

to reduce the number of children in poverty by more than 40%.

People who have children, you know, that's work that families are doing and it's work that they're doing on behalf of all of us.

So this is a way to try to support families doing that work that allows them to choose for themselves how best to spend the money to invest in their children.

The pandemic's expanded legislation expired in 2021.

As of 2022, the tax credit is back to its pre-pandemic levels, which maxes out at $2,000 per child with the parents of younger children receiving a larger subsidy.

It's kind of a way to subsidize or support parents, but it typically has not included very low income parents.

We've excluded parents who don't have earnings, parents with disabilities, or for other reasons that aren't in the labor force.

From the time it was enacted until last year's temporary expansion, the child tax credit was actually not made available in full to 50% of Black children and families because their family's income were too low.

It's important to me, I think, that we have a child tax credit that is not connected to a work requirement.

To me, the child tax credit is paying for the work of being a parent, which is work that benefits us all.

To attach additional work requirements to that sort of undermines this intent of helping families in a way that makes sense for them.

There are 2 other policies that economists and other experts advocate for when it comes to helping families.

Subsidized child care and paid family leave.

These policies go hand in hand because paid family leave means parents can stay home and take care of their children themselves.

Is the only OECD country that does not have a federal paid leave program.

Workers have access to paid family leave by their employer.

There is a law on the books at the federal level that requires employers to allow parents to take unpaid leave up to 12 weeks, as long as the private employer has 50 or more employees.

When it's unpaid, it's not really an option.

It's not really a choice that many families can take across this country.

And it's not just low income families or many middle income families that are living paycheck to paycheck that simply can't afford to take leave how it is now.

What we see is that black families Latino families Native American families Workers are less likely to be able to afford unpaid leave from work than white workers, again, reflecting and enhancing racial economic disparities across the board.

There are some states and localities that have passed paid family and medical leave, and that provides for a paid parental leave as 1 component of that to make sure that workers actually have the option to take that leave.

Each state with paid family and medical leave sets its laws up differently, but typically the law requires employers to provide workers with up to 12 weeks of fully or partially paid leave per year.

The programs are often funded by payroll taxes from workers, with some states also requiring employers to contribute.

Paternity leave for me was 16 weeks and that's full 100% salary.

We wouldn't be able to do what we're doing without any kind of leave.

1 of the issues with child care in the U.S.

We have programs that fully subsidize for eligible children at a child care seat, programs like Head Start and some state preschool.

We have tax credits that subsidize a portion of child care costs for higher income families.

We also have block grants to states to help them expand access.

And the problem with all of these systems is that with this multitude of approaches, we're not getting close to universality or affordability.

We're not helping the workers in these sectors, and we're not doing enough on quality.

There's a lot of value in having states move forward and do these kind of programs.

But ultimately, to have it be something that's available to everybody everywhere, you need the federal government to be willing to make these kind of investments in care infrastructures.

There's so many moments that I would have missed if it was back in the day where fathers would get like 2 weeks.

And those are some things I like I will cherish for the rest of my life.

President Biden tried to address all of these policies at the federal level with his Build Back Better infrastructure bill that he proposed even before he entered the White House.

The president doesn't talk a lot about the Build Back Better bill, but that was his proposal that included things like an expanded child tax credit, like a near universal child care program that would have capped the amount of income people had to pay toward child care.

It included a paid leave type program, really included these big building blocks of a better family support program that ran into opposition from 1 key Democrat Senator Joe Manchin in West Virginia.

1 of the things that I think is important is that we think about rebalancing our investments toward children because it pays for itself.

If we were to rebalance federal investments away from senior citizens and toward children, not only would raising a child be more affordable in the U.S.

But the children would have sufficient resources.

Their parents would be better able to think about how they want to spend their time, whether it's that extra hour at work or an extra hour playing with their kids.

All of those things become possible if we rebalance federal spending toward kids.

We know that investing in our children has a multiplier effect.

What it means for those children's families, what it means for those children in adulthood, and what it means for the entire economy just have incredible ripple effects.

And so investing in children actually impacts Americans of all ages in addition to our entire economy.


Speaker 0: It's very expensive to raise a child in the U.S. I knew

Speaker 1: it was going to be expensive. I didn't know it was going to be that expensive.

Speaker 0: The free market works well in many different sectors, but childcare is not

Speaker 2: 1 of them.

Speaker 3: Sending an infant to daycare in many places across the country is actually more expensive than in-state public tuition to send them to college.

Speaker 2: When we looked it up, it turned out our daughter's daycare was more than Stanford's tuition. We didn't really start to dig into it until we had a baby and I was on maternity leave and then the numbers really started to hit home and it was like, how are we going to do this?

Speaker 4: Many Americans are struggling to make ends meet. More than 12.5 million children in the U.S. Live in poverty. Even middle-class families are increasingly struggling to pay for everyday expenses.

Speaker 2: We stopped saving any money altogether. We were living paycheck to paycheck every month to pay rent in the Bay Area and pay for child care.

Speaker 3: In this country, we don't have comprehensive policies. And so that means we are working with piecemeal programs to try to help people make ends

Speaker 5: meet. I think the United States has just been very reluctant, very conservative when it comes to these kind of family policies.

Speaker 6: Improving the social safety net, lowering the overall cost of raising children in this country is both the right thing to do for American families and a smart thing to do for our entire American economy.

Speaker 0: The fundamental issue is not that we don't know what to do. We know that children need stability. The way to get to stability is making sure families have sufficient resources and sufficient time. If we know what to do, how do we pay for it?

Speaker 4: Here's why it's so expensive to raise kids in the U.S. And which policies could help Americans.

Speaker 2: My name is Janice. I am a mother of 2 children, a four-year-old and a two-year-old. And we live right outside San

Speaker 1: Francisco. Darren Geter, I'm producer for CBC. I recently just had my first kid, my daughter Alma. Basically, I've been on paternity leave for the last 8 weeks, so I'm halfway through. Everything is very expensive in New Jersey.

People always warn you like there's going to be a ton of stuff they need to buy for the baby whether it comes with diapers or wipes and we didn't necessarily understand how much we have to buy.

Speaker 2: If we had had 2 kids in full-time daycare it would have been a lot more than rent. So that's why it just absolutely wasn't an option. And when we looked at the numbers for full time nannies in the San Francisco area, they all charge about 80 grand a year.

Speaker 1: We don't have concrete plans of what we're going to do with child care because we know that child care can range anywhere from a thousand dollars a month or somewhere could be like as paying as like a double rent.

Speaker 4: The average family with at least 1 child under the age of 5 typically spends around 13 percent of the family's income on child care according to a September 2021 Treasury Department report. That's about 1 out of every 8 dollars. That's more than what the average household spends on groceries and nearly double what the government considers affordable for low-income families.

Speaker 6: Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the median black family with 2 kids was spending roughly 56% of their annual income on childcare, a bigger share than any other racial group. And of course, we know during COVID, for all families, childcare centers and school closures were forcing parents to pay for childcare in ways that they never had had to before.

Speaker 3: For over 20 years, the Economic Policy Institute has produced something called the Family Budget Calculator. And in that we look at basic expenses across the country. Housing, child care if you have kids, health care, transportation, food, other incidentals like household items, and your taxes. 1 of the things we noticed when we were doing this about 4 or 5 years ago is that childcare became more expensive than rent in many places across the country.

Speaker 4: The most recent report released by the Department of Agriculture in 2015 estimated that for a middle-income household with 2 parents and 2 children, it would cost more than $233,600 to raise a child from birth through age 17. And that's in 2015 dollars. With inflation, that number translates to almost $286,000 in 2022. The report calculated it would cost the hypothetical family of 4 anywhere from $9,330 to $23,380 per child in 1 year. This range depends on the age of the child and income of the parents.

Adjusting for inflation, that range in 2022 would be between about $11,400 and $28,600. But adjusting for inflation may not be enough. Child care costs have actually outpaced inflation. Child care prices surpassed annual inflation by nearly 4 percentage points in 2020. And that was before the worst of the pandemic inflation woes.

Speaker 6: And that data is based on middle class, 2 parent households. Just think about what that cost looks like when we're talking about single parents, or if we're talking about families of color on the struggling end of the racial wealth gap in this country.

Speaker 2: I'd say we're middle-class for the area we're living in. I actually am not sure how some people get by living in the Bay Area that make less than my husband and I do. We cannot wait until next year because 1 of our children is going to public school next year and we might finally be able to start saving some money again. Families that are right on the poverty line on average, if they're white in this country, have $18,000 of net worth. Families at

Speaker 6: the poverty line, if they're black in this country, on average have at or below $0 in net worth. Just think about what that $18,000 difference means to parents when their second grader falls off the monkey bars and they're facing unanticipated medical costs.

Speaker 3: Policymakers acted very swiftly in the pandemic and enacted policies that had tangible, positive results for workers and their families.

Speaker 5: We do a lot of family supports through the tax code and sort of the most prominent example here is something called the child tax credit.

Speaker 4: The child tax credit allows parents to deduct a certain amount of money from their taxes at the end of each year. That amount depends on several factors, household income, how many children someone has, and the age of the children.

Speaker 6: The Child Tax Credit, enacted in 1997 with broad bipartisan support, was enacted in response to slow wage growth, higher cost of living, and a growing tax burden for average households. It was enacted to help reduce the tax burden on families with children, to help reduce the cost of raising kids.

Speaker 4: Congress temporarily expanded the policy during the pandemic.

Speaker 1: The bill, as amended, is passed.

Speaker 4: The tax credit was raised to $3,000 a year for children between 6 and 17 years old and jumped to $3,600 a year for children 5 and under.

Speaker 5: And for at least half of the year, it was paid out monthly. So both a kind of substantial boost in value and this monthly payment. So you're not waiting till the end of, you know, when you file taxes the next year to get it.

Speaker 3: And that provided a solid safety net to try to help familie ends meet during those tu reduce hunger in families of those kinds of programs.

Speaker 6: In 2021 alone, the expanded child tax credit was estimated to lift 4.1 million children above the poverty line, and

Speaker 7: to reduce the number of children in poverty by more than 40%. People who have children, you know, that's work that families are doing and it's work that they're doing on behalf of all of us. So this is a way to try to support families doing that work that allows them to choose for themselves how best to spend the money to invest in their children.

Speaker 4: The pandemic's expanded legislation expired in 2021. As of 2022, the tax credit is back to its pre-pandemic levels, which maxes out at $2,000 per child with the parents of younger children receiving a larger subsidy.

Speaker 5: It's kind of a way to subsidize or support parents, but it typically has not included very low income parents. We've excluded parents who don't have earnings, parents with disabilities, or for other reasons that aren't in the labor force.

Speaker 6: From the time it was enacted until last year's temporary expansion, the child tax credit was actually not made available in full to 50% of Black children and families because their family's income were too low.

Speaker 7: It's important to me, I think, that we have a child tax credit that is not connected to a work requirement. To me, the child tax credit is paying for the work of being a parent, which is work that benefits us all. To attach additional work requirements to that sort of undermines this intent of helping families in a way that makes sense for them.

Speaker 4: There are 2 other policies that economists and other experts advocate for when it comes to helping families. Subsidized child care and paid family leave. These policies go hand in hand because paid family leave means parents can stay home and take care of their children themselves.

Speaker 7: The U.S. Is the only OECD country that does not have a federal paid leave program.

Speaker 6: Less than a quarter of U.S. Workers have access to paid family leave by their employer.

Speaker 4: There is a law on the books at the federal level that requires employers to allow parents to take unpaid leave up to 12 weeks, as long as the private employer has 50 or more employees.

Speaker 3: When it's unpaid, it's not really an option. It's not really a choice that many families can take across this country. And it's not just low income families or many middle income families that are living paycheck to paycheck that simply can't afford to take leave how it is now.

Speaker 6: What we see is that black families Latino families Native American families Workers are less likely to be able to afford unpaid leave from work than white workers, again, reflecting and enhancing racial economic disparities across the board.

Speaker 3: There are some states and localities that have passed paid family and medical leave, and that provides for a paid parental leave as 1 component of that to make sure that workers actually have the option to take that leave.

Speaker 4: Each state with paid family and medical leave sets its laws up differently, but typically the law requires employers to provide workers with up to 12 weeks of fully or partially paid leave per year. The programs are often funded by payroll taxes from workers, with some states also requiring employers to contribute.

Speaker 1: Paternity leave for me was 16 weeks and that's full 100% salary. We wouldn't be able to do what we're doing without any kind of leave.

Speaker 0: 1 of the issues with child care in the U.S. Is it's a patchwork system. We have programs that fully subsidize for eligible children at a child care seat, programs like Head Start and some state preschool. We have tax credits that subsidize a portion of child care costs for higher income families. We also have block grants to states to help them expand access.

And the problem with all of these systems is that with this multitude of approaches, we're not getting close to universality or affordability. We're not helping the workers in these sectors, and we're not doing enough on quality.

Speaker 5: There's a lot of value in having states move forward and do these kind of programs. But ultimately, to have it be something that's available to everybody everywhere, you need the federal government to be willing to make these kind of investments in care infrastructures.

Speaker 1: There's so many moments that I would have missed if it was back in the day where fathers would get like 2 weeks. And those are some things I like I will cherish for the rest of my life.

Speaker 4: President Biden tried to address all of these policies at the federal level with his Build Back Better infrastructure bill that he proposed even before he entered the White House.

Speaker 5: The president doesn't talk a lot about the Build Back Better bill, but that was his proposal that included things like an expanded child tax credit, like a near universal child care program that would have capped the amount of income people had to pay toward child care. It included a paid leave type program, really included these big building blocks of a better family support program that ran into opposition from 1 key Democrat Senator Joe Manchin in West Virginia.

Speaker 0: 1 of the things that I think is important is that we think about rebalancing our investments toward children because it pays for itself. If we were to rebalance federal investments away from senior citizens and toward children, not only would raising a child be more affordable in the U.S. But the children would have sufficient resources. Their parents would be better able to think about how they want to spend their time, whether it's that extra hour at work or an extra hour playing with their kids. All of those things become possible if we rebalance federal spending toward kids.

Speaker 6: We know that investing in our children has a multiplier effect. What it means for those children's families, what it means for those children in adulthood, and what it means for the entire economy just have incredible ripple effects. And so investing in children actually impacts Americans of all ages in addition to our entire economy.

Speaker 5: Thank you.

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How Much It Actually Costs To Raise Kids In The U.S.