By Ambar Calvillo-Rivera
El Paso Matters recently convened regional leaders at the El Paso Forward summit to face a hard truth: our population is aging, our birth rate is declining, and school districts are watching enrollment slide as our future workforce shrinks.
What didn’t make it onto that conversation is a lever sitting in plain sight: access to quality, affordable childcare. It’s both a driver of that demographic strain and one of the fastest tools we have to respond to it.
I think of a family when I hear “demographic forecast.” Close friends recently found out they were expecting, and did what many soon-to-be parents do: started looking for childcare early.
It’s a dual-income household with a solid combined salary. They used a checklist to find the best fit near their home. The answer surprised them: not many centers near their home, and the best option they found ran $365 a week for infant care, about $1,500 a month.
That was a number they could plan around. They bought a family car. They started preparing. Then they learned they were having twins. Suddenly, that number doubled: over $3,000 a month, on top of the new car note. The cost of a second mortgage. Even for this financially secure household, the number tightened the budget.
That’s a story behind a phrase we keep coming back to at Early Matters El Paso: childcare is as important to our economic infrastructure as roads or broadband. A single variable can shift a family’s finances and family planning, regardless of income. In a region with real childcare deserts, that risk sits closer to the surface than most assume.
And the workforce that powers our workforce is stretched just as thin. Providers across our network describe the same tightrope: rising costs for classroom materials and food, alongside pressure to keep tuition affordable. Like many small businesses, they’re caught in the middle: raising wages without raising prices for families.
The numbers back up both sides of that story. In El Paso, a household earning $35,000 a year spends roughly 26% of its income on childcare for one child, at an average cost of $9,120 a year, per Workforce Solutions Borderplex data. Nationally, families with young children are nearly a third less likely to make ends meet than families without them.
This is a workforce and economic development issue for our region. In El Paso, 59% of children younger than 6 live in households where every available parent is working. When childcare falls through in those homes, there’s no easy backup: employees miss shifts, cut hours or leave jobs altogether.
Last year, women who voluntarily left the workforce cited childcare costs as the primary reason. And a recent Texas 2036 survey found 56.7% of parents say childcare costs shaped decisions about having more children. In some cases, the cost keeps families from having any children at all.
Affordable childcare shapes who stays to work and build a future in El Paso after graduation. Whether the young, educated talent builds a career here also depends on whether the region signals that a career and a family are both possible here. These are complex challenges that will take multiple stakeholders to address.
While state and federal solutions are crucial, significant change can be driven locally. El Paso businesses and civic leaders have the ability to create a stronger early childhood ecosystem by implementing policies that support working families.
Early Matters El Paso is running the Best Place for Working Parents campaign and every employer, of any size, can take the free, online, three-minute self-assessment to benchmark their policies and can earn the national designation. Employers also get evidence-based strategies they can implement to support their employees, many low to no cost. It’s open now through Sept. 11 and participating employers will gain free marketing of their designation.
Employers can also take advantage of the federal 45F tax credit that makes employer-supported childcare more valuable, raising the credit up to 50% for small businesses with a cap up to $600,000.
If you’re considering childcare benefits, ask your tax advisor what this could mean for your business. If offering full childcare benefits isn’t possible, the tax credit covers 10% of the cost of connecting employees to childcare referrals. Early Matters El Paso can help leaders structure engagement for this.
The region’s demographic trends show us where we’ve been, but they don’t have to be a script for the future. El Paso still holds the power to choose a different direction and access to quality, affordable childcare is one of the clearest places to start charting a different path.
Ambar Calvillo-Rivera resides in Central El Paso. She is the Founding Executive Director of Early Matters El Paso, a regional coalition of cross-sector leaders dedicated to building a stronger, more equitable early childhood system across the Borderplex region. Early Matters El Paso is a project of the El Paso Community Foundation.
The post Opinion: Affordable childcare is a missing piece in El Paso’s population changes appeared first on El Paso Matters.
Read: Read More