Parents in the United States, particularly mothers, are facing an unprecedented affordability crisis. A glaring sign of that crisis is revealed in statistics showing that Generation Z and millennial women are regularly delaying parenthood, having fewer children or not becoming parents at all. The data shows that many of these women want families but find the costs of housing, childcare, groceries, healthcare, utilities and more make parenting unaffordable.
People feel worse off financially now than they have at any point in the past 25 years. Those feelings are rooted in fact. The same basic pillars of living — housing, healthcare, food, transportation, childcare, utilities — now consume so much of a household budget that a typical family needs to earn $145,000 a year to make ends meet.
A pound of hamburger now costs more than people earn for an hour of work at the federal minimum wage.
A pound of hamburger now costs more than people earn in an hour at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. Gas prices (and car prices) are going up steeply. Groceries are up. Healthcare costs are rising steeply, and millions are being pushed off healthcare altogether as premiums rise. And for those who are taking care of older parents or family, paying for dignified aging and disability care is also mind-bogglingly expensive.
And that’s before we even really start talking about the costs in money and time that come with raising kids.
No amount of juggling, balancing, flowers, calendar maintenance, self-care moments, wine, chocolate or walks can fix the chain of dominoes that currently start disastrously falling the moment a person becomes a mom.
For the households that need the wages of moms to survive, and that’s most of them, paid childcare is essential. But the cost of childcare now exceeds the price of public college in most states, and childcare is more than rent in 17 states. Affordability isn’t the only crisis in childcare: 51% of people live in a childcare desert, meaning there aren’t enough facilities that people can afford. Plus, childcare workers are some of the lowest-paid workers in the country and often are pushed out of their profession due to low pay. Even so, President Donald Trump has been targeting deep cuts for Head Start and other essential childcare programs that are proven to boost families and the economy overall. These cuts ripple out in the economy in destructive ways. The childcare crisis is estimated to cost our nation $172 billion per year.
Infant childcare is among the most expensive kindother, and that cost is amplified because the U.S. is one of only six nations in the world that doesn’t have some form of national paid family and medical leave. This means that when a new baby arrives, moms often have to go back to work before they are healed or have time to bond with the new baby. A quarter of moms in the U.S. return to work within two weeks of giving birth. In this mix, many moms are pushed out of their jobs entirely. This, too, is costly. Families lose $34 billion per year due to lack of access to paid family and medical leave.
A quarter of moms in the U.S. return to work within two weeks of giving birth.
For those moms who somehow make it work at work, it’s still not fair: Moms overall are paid just 74 cents for every dollar paid to full-time dads, Black moms are paid just 56 cents and Latina moms just 51 cents for every dollar a full-time non-Hispanic white father makes. This is part of deep and enduring wage and hiring discrimination against moms. One study found that if presented with equivalent resumes, hiring managers hired non-moms 84% of the time, but moms just 47% of the time. Women raising children were also offered significantly lower starting salaries, while dads got a wage increase. This hurts everyone: According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, the nation’s gross domestic product would go up almost 3% if there were pay parity.
The human costs are immense, too. Between 2016 and 2023, mothers reported a nearly 65% increase of “fair to poor” mental health.
This crisis has been building for years, driven in part by Republican leaders consistently blocking widely popular legislation like the Child Care for Working Families Act and the Child Care for Every Community Act. GOP leaders have also refused to advance the Family Act (paid family and medical leave) and have repeatedly cut healthcare and food affordability programs, including SNAP and WIC. Since Trump’s second term began, MAGA policies have further dismantled the already fragile systems families rely on to work and raise kids. These leaders have redirected funds from essential services into tax cuts for billionaires, out-of-control immigration enforcement and reckless wars, an effort that again is raising energy costs and driving inflation, which hits families hardest.
Pro-ballroom Republicans have cut $911 billion from Medicaid and $200 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program over 10 years. They have also frozen more than $10 billion in childcare funds. On top of that, the president’s budget for fiscal 2027 proposes to cut $4 billion from utilities support and $27 billion from housing, among many additional cuts.
That’s at least $1.1 trillion less (with even more cuts lined up) for family economic security. Period.
Trump has said it clearly with his budgets and his words. His priority is reckless wars, not families: “We’re fighting wars, we can’t take care of daycare,” he said recently.
This paints moms and people who want to be parents into a corner, with nowhere to turn.
President Trump has said it clearly with his budgets and his words. His priority is reckless wars, not families.
We know what the problems are, and we have real, tested solutions that work — and strong bipartisan support from voters in poll after poll: childcare and eldercare, paid family and medical leave, and healthcare. Enacting these care-infrastructure policies doesn’t just open avenues for people to be able to have children and succeed, it also helps narrow the motherhood wage gaps and boost the economy, too.
But unless Republicans finally join Democrats in pushing for real action at the federal level, we will see more moms in crisis, fewer people able to afford to have children and, on Mother’s Day in the future, fewer moms to celebrate.
Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner is the executive director of MomsRising, an advocacy organization for moms and families with a cumulative membership of 3.7 million that focuses on policies that expand access to child care, health care, paid family/medical leave, maternal health, and economic opportunity.