Comment by saguntum

Yeah, childcare costs are absolutely brutal nowadays. We are lucky enough to be able to hire a nanny 3 days a week with grandparents caring for them 2 days a week with young children. Daycare costs so much that this situation ends up being cost competitive.

Cost of living in my Texas city is about 10% lower than the national average, but I have friends shelling out $1400/month for 1 child. That's more than my mortgage payment from a house we got in 2020.

I haven't done looked at the FRED graphs, but I wonder how much people leaving the labor force due to the math not working out for childcare costs is happening.

I am sure these numbers seem kind of low to folks living in high cost of living areas, but the median household income here is just over $60K.