My daughter goes to daycare for free. What?!
It’s subsidized through my husband’s job, and I know how rare that is. We’re preparing for a move, which means we’ll be giving this amazing benefit up, and it will convert into a major line-item expense for us.
So I’ve been running the numbers. What’s the salary floor to clear before daycare eats the difference? It’s also the number that tells me whether a second child is possible, because two in daycare at once is a different life than one.
Two of the most annoying questions for women:
When are you going to have kids?
When are you having another?
My response: Get out of here; it’s none of your business. Will you be raising them or contributing to their college fund?
Recently, and thankfully, there’s been greater attention to the hardships of motherhood (e.g., daycare costs, career discrimination, overall well-being). Instead of merely talking about why women are opting out of motherhood or limiting the number of kids they have, there’s some traction on what can be done to create enabling environments.
Are government incentives the solution?
Some governments are offering incentives for women to have more babies: Singapore’s Baby Bonus, Hungary’s lifetime income tax exemption for mothers of four, and the U.S. Trump Accounts, seeded with $1,000 at birth for education expenses.
Meanwhile, the US fertility rate hit 1.6 births per woman in 2024, the lowest ever recorded, against the 2.1 you’d need to hold a population steady. In a November 2024 survey, 71% of Americans said raising children is unaffordable. Childcare costs came back as the single most-cited reason people gave for limiting family size, at roughly twice the rate of any other factor.
Women are doing the math and arriving at no.
I registered my daughter for a Trump Account (free-ish money from my taxes), but $1,000 at an assumed 8% annual compounding interest without further contributions gets me to maybe covering her college book expenses. That nominal government incentive certainly wasn’t factored into my financial decision-making for sustaining a child over at least 18 years.
The unpaid part
The National Partnership for Women & Families put the value of unpaid caregiving in the US at more than $1.1 trillion a year. Women do about two-thirds of it. Their share alone is worth roughly $683 billion.
That work doesn’t show up in GDP or on a resume. The cracks show when you take the 4pm meeting from your car, and as the gap a hiring manager asks about four years later.
Mom’s First released a documentary called No Country for Mothers, following Reshma Saujani. It highlights that the women vs. women trope of the girlboss versus tradwife fight is a distraction: two camps yelling at each other about philosophy while nobody funds the actual care. More than 2,500 people crowdfunded the film as credited producers, which tells you something about how badly mothers wanted this said out loud.
And then there’s the policy version of the distraction. Jill Filipovic wrote in Slate about the push, drawn from the Heritage Foundation’s “Saving America by Saving the Family,” to subsidize stay-at-home mothers. Read the fine print, and it only reaches married women with a full-time employed spouse. Single mothers and unmarried cohabiting parents are out. Right now, 80% of childcare credit recipients are single parents, mostly single mothers. Current childcare assistance runs around $9,000 a year per child against costs that can top $30,000.
So the proposal pays some women to leave the workforce while defunding the support that keeps other women in it.
What I’ve tried
I want to be specific because vague solidarity doesn’t help anybody.
Fair Play. My husband and I use a version of Eve Rodsky’s system. We have a document that lays out who owns what, and we meet about it when we feel changes are needed. It’s an ongoing negotiation, and that’s the point. It’s a step toward equity and visibility. A lot of the resentment I’ve watched build in other couples starts with work that one person can’t see.
Solopreneurship. I can pick my daughter up in the afternoon. When she’s sick, I’m usually the one who stays home if we can’t get other family to help out. At this stage of her life, that flexibility has worked for us. Although I can see the shift as I build a portfolio career where I have more demands and we’ll likely have to pay to cover childcare gaps.
Knowing my number. I calculated what we need to earn to cover daycare and still come out ahead. Plus, we’ll be giving up access to our support network, and that means additional costs for aftercare and babysitters. I advocate for my clients and any woman I know to advocate for her worth, but in this climate, my number feels like my direct deposit should go directly to daycare.
At 40, I bought an option
Before any of this, I was 40 and single in New York. I was living a great life with my yappy dog and getting nervous about whether motherhood was available to me.
I met with a reproductive endocrinologist and used $50,000 in benefits through Carrot to freeze my eggs. Until that benefit existed, this was a door I couldn’t afford to open.
I was fortunate to not have any adverse reactions to the medication, and I received excellent medical care. I wasn’t sure about becoming a single mother, or what my life would look like if I opted out of motherhood entirely.
Egg retrieval bought me some time to figure it out.
About a year later, I met my husband, and we conceived naturally. That was luck, landing on top of a decision I’d already made. We make decisions with the information that we have at the time.
Recently, my gynecologist, who is considering whether she wants children, asked me point-blank, “Given what you know now, would you still have decided to have your daughter?” I hesitated a bit before saying yes. I told her two things helped me prepare. One, I helped care for my nephews during the pandemic, which gave me rare insight into raising kids. The other was that I’ve never had rose-colored glasses about motherhood. As an adult, I can see how much work my mom put into raising me—activities, life lessons, setting boundaries. Motherhood is shaping a person, and I don’t take that charge lightly.
My slogan: “Motherhood, it’s as tough as I thought it would be.”
What’s moving
Good news: There seems to be a bit of a wake-up call that mothers don’t have to carry all of the weight. Here are some positive shifts in our ecosystems:
New York State committed $4.5 billion to child care for FY27 with universal pre-K for every four-year-old by the 2028-29 school year and free care for two-year-olds in the city.
Mayor Mamdani opened the city’s first free on-site child care center for municipal workers this fall, saving participating families up to $20,000 a year. It’s 40 children. It’s also proof of concept, and proof of concept is how this stuff spreads.
Employers are moving too, unevenly. Carrot existed for me because a company decided fertility was a benefit and not a personal problem. Amazon, AARP and Levi’s have all built out caregiving support in the last two years.
No Country for Mothers is doing something I haven’t seen policy do: getting women who’d normally be on opposite sides of this argument into the same room.
There’s still so much work to be done. But the story that this is simply how it is for mothers is being rewritten.
What’s your story?
If you’re weighing whether to become a mother: what’s the question you can’t get past?
And if you’re already in it: what holds your week together?
In solidarity,
Meris