It’s not an exaggeration when parents in Alexandria say they’re paying “more than the mortgage” for childcare every month.
The average price of a home in greater Alexandria is $582,000 — more if you want to live in certain areas like Old Town, Fort Hunt or Mount Vernon. The average monthly mortgage in this area tops $2,560 per month, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
“I have friends who pay around $700 per week per child,” says Ashley Burris, a mother of two. “Especially in Old Town, it’s around $2,600 per month. And it’s even more during the summer when we pay extra summer activity fees.”
The Washington, DC metro area has the highest child care costs in the nation, according to Child Care Aware, a nonprofit that serves as an information clearinghouse for parents and caregivers.
The average cost for infant care at a daycare center in the region is $1,885 per month. Families who also have a child in pre-school can pay an additional $1,485 per month. The cost of infant and child care in a “family” setting (in someone’s home) can be less expensive — but often not by much.
Of course, the cost of a family’s child care can vary widely depending on what type of care they family chooses, the hours, location and other factors.
Earlier this year, SmartAsset reported that Alexandria had the fourth-highest median earnings for women in the country at nearly $67,000, tied with San Francisco. Even in dual-income households, paying the equivalent of a second mortgage for childcare is a significant cost.
Burris, who works as an analyst for the Department of Commerce in Reston, and her husband, who consults for the Department of Defense in Arlington, originally paid to have a full-time au pair for their 4-year-old daughter and 1-year-old son because they had trouble finding any child care centers with openings for both their children.
Though most people think having an au pair sounds expensive, Burris says once the bigger up-front costs were out of the way, her regular stipend was actually cheaper than paying to send their children to full-time day care.
The J-1 Visa for their au pair’s first year with them was $8,500, she explains. The second year she was with them was only $5,000 since she was staying with the same family. The au pair lived with them in a bedroom in their home, and the Burrises paid for her to have a car to get around and a phone to stay in touch.
After those costs, her regular stipend was $200 per week, she says.
“If you do the math, it averaged only $350 to $400 a week for the year to have full-time, in-home care,” she says, after the visa costs. “We were really blessed to have that experience.”
Unfortunately, after 16 months, their au pair decided to move to another state, leaving the Burris family less than two weeks to find full-time child care for their two young children.
This time, they opted for a full-time child care center that would be reliable year-round — which proved easier said than done.
“Most places had a waiting list of at least a year,” she said. “And, at first, the costs made me sick to my stomach.”
When they finally found a place that was affordable — around $2,160 a month for the two children — there was only an opening for their daughter, and not their son, since the center only took children 2 years and older, and their son was 16 months old at the time.
They finally found another center owned by the same company that would take their son, but that means Burris and her husband currently do two different morning drop-offs and evening pick-ups, in addition to their commutes to Reston and Arlington for work.
After all that, they still hope to have more children--and with their daughter starting elementary school soon, that would mean three different drop-offs with a new baby and, of course, more money for child care.
“It might be hard, and the cost might be crazy, but it’s what we want to do, and it’s the life we want to have, so we decided, we’re going to make it happen,” Burris says.
Some parents might think the costs go down once the children are in school full-time, but the Bevins family says they also pay around $2,000 per month, even though one of their two children is in elementary school most of the day.
Their daughter goes to SACC, or School- Aged Child Care, on site at her school before and after school.
“SACC for her is around $600 per month during the school year,” says mom Erika Bevins, who works for the Department of the Treasury in D.C. full-time. “And then full-time child care for our youngest, our son, is around $1,500 per month.”
That doesn’t even include summer camps and extra-curricular activities for her daughter, who loves to take dance and gymnastics, she says.
The family trip to Disney World, or even having much of a savings at all, have been on the backburner for years, and are likely to stay there for several more, she says.
“Once a year we get to go to Delaware to the beach for two weeks, mainly because we have family friends with a house there that will rent it to us for only $100 a night. But we don’t get to do as much as we like,” Bevins says. “We’ve never taken the kids to Disney World. I’ve never gotten to take my kids on a European vacation or an island destination or Disney World, because you’re talking $7,000 to $10,000, and that’s just not doable.”
Lack of savings aside, life for the Bevinses can be a little chaotic between the various schedules and commutes as well.
Erika’s husband is active duty Air Force. When he’s not deployed, Erika says he has a truly horrible commute back and forth to Fort Meade in Baltimore during the week, forcing him to be out the door by 5 each morning. The drive home is even worse and can take nearly two hours most days, meaning Erika does the morning drop-off and evening pick-up routines all by herself the majority of the time.
The chaos and finances have led Erika to consider staying home with the children, but living on her husband’s income alone would be even tougher. Plus, Erika loves her job.
“We decided that we knew it would be tight for several years, but me staying in the workforce outweighed the benefits of me staying home,” she says. “Plus, I have a really great job. If I didn’t, it would be a different story.”
The Judy Family
Military families are fortunate to receive assistance from the government to help cover the cost of child care for families in which both spouses work full-time.
However, as the Judy family will tell you, that doesn’t always go far, especially when it comes to the Northern Virginia/ D.C. area, which has one of the highest costs of living in the country.
Melissa Judy is the mother of a 4 ½-year-old daughter, and her husband, whom she is separated from, is an active-duty Army officer currently stationed at Fort Belvoir. Melissa works full-time in the Alumni Relations Office at George Mason University in Fairfax. They live in the Kingstowne neighborhood.
Melissa said the Army currently deposits $850 per month directly into the family’s account at the full-time day care center their daughter attends in Kingstowne, but the full cost is around $1,400 per month for their one child.
Melissa said she realizes they are fortunate to get more than half of their monthly childcare bill covered by the Army, but in order to receive that, they are severely limited in the centers that are approved--and with such a large population of military families in the area competing for a spot in an approved center, it can be difficult, to say the least.
“There’s often a waitlist for approved centers,” she said.
Melissa said the waitlist at the center that was their first choice for their daughter was more than a year long- -and once they finally got to the top of the list and got a call to enroll her, the Army had suddenly taken it off the “Approved” list.
“There are on-post child care centers at most stations, like Belvoir, but the waiting lists are always extremely long,” she said. “If there’s a spot on-post, you have to take it, but if they are full, you can usually get fee assistance to use off-site care like we do.”
She explains that many of her friends opt for in-home child care providers, but in the past, they have proved unreliable.
“If a home-based caregiver is ill or needs to take leave for a while, we’re left without care. We’re stuck,” she said. “We didn’t want to deal with that either. At child care centers, they are fully staffed and employees can cover for each other.”
If they had more than one child, she said their situation — even if they weren’t separated — would be impossible.
“There would be no way we could afford it, even with fee assistance. There would be no way,” she said emphatically. “At that point it would just be cheaper if I stayed home.”
As for other military families, in this area or elsewhere, Melissa highly recommends reaching out to the National Military Family Association, where she previously worked helping military families find the assistance and resources they need, such as the child care assistance funding they use.
“[They] work hard to educate military families, so I’m always trying to let people know there is this wonderful resource out there.”
The Irwin Family
In addition to the high cost of childcare, for some families the chaotic commutes and pick-up/ drop-off scrambles take a toll on family life.
Purvi Irwin and her husband are parents of 2-year-old twins and a rising third-grader. Before having three children, Purvi worked for more than a decade as an architect. Post-children, she opted to transition to consulting rather than leave her career.
“I put a lot into my education and career,” Purvi said. “When the kids were born I realized I could either be stressed out at work, or stressed out at home. Being stressed out at home didn’t seem like an option for me. I like my career.”
With her consulting job, Purvi negotiated an agreement that no more than 10 to 15 percent of her time would be spent traveling, substantially reducing the amount she was traveling before as an architect, visiting clients around the country.
Purvi’s husband is a government contractor, meaning they both have full-time work schedules, and therefore the role of “dropper-off” and “picker-upper” varies from day to day depending on how crazy both of their schedules are and who needs to be in the office earlier.
“Typically my husband gets up first at around 5:20 a.m. and then makes the coffee while I get the twins dressed and then send them downstairs to him so he can feed them breakfast while I get myself ready,” Purvi explains. “Then, depending on how both of our days are looking, we decide who will do the two drop-offs.”
Their older daughter, who is in elementary school, can’t get to school any earlier than 7:30, so Purvi said they all usually try to leave the house by 7 or 7:15 a.m. and go to drop the twins off at their daycare center first, then drop off their daughter at 7:30 to eat breakfast in the cafeteria at school before the first bell rings at 8 a.m.
“Some days one of us will do both drop-offs and pickups, and some days we split it, it just depends,” she adds. The same goes for evening pick-ups.
Sometimes it takes a few tries to find the right after-school program for elementary school children. After looking at their options, they decided to send their daughter to the Boys and Girls Club right across the street from their school. “She likes it at the Boys and Girls Club, they have other activities like dance, art club, field trips and so on. She can walk there right from school, and they are open until 7 p.m. Sometimes she will stay late because she likes to do art club, and sometimes we pick her up earlier.”
Purvi said she and her husband realize such a busy schedule can have an impact on the children — especially the young twins.
“I think it definitely impacts them; I definitely think that it’s hard for them sometimes. Like the fact that most days, we barely get home just in time for dinner and bed,” she said. “And being kind of rushed in the morning, they can feel it. Some days they’re happy to have us leave [them at daycare], sometimes they get upset and it takes us longer to get out of there.”
“Especially with our 2-year-old twins, some days are smooth and happy, and other days are full of temper tantrums. But we try hard to do something special with them every day at least a little bit, like sit with them and read a book or play a game with them at night, and make sure they get Mommy and Daddy time.”
“Mommy and Daddy time” includes taking as many little family trips as possible, like the five-day camping trip they just took recently, as well as lots of playing on the weekends or going to family festivals or to see the local 4th of July fireworks.
As for costs, Purvi said they are fortunate that they can afford the roughly $36,000 per year they pay for the twins’ full-time daycare as well as the donation they make each year to the Boys and Girls Club, which only requires a small registration fee each year and is otherwise free. However, it does mean some things take longer to save up for, such as the addition they are finally about to put on their house.
“That’s something we’ve been saving up for, for quite a while,” she said.
This piece originally appeared in the September/October 2018 print edition of Alexandria Living Magazine. Subscribe here.