Parents pull kids from day care as money tightens

Battling a deepening recession, some American parents are telling day care providers they must scale back or abandon their services.

Instead, they keep kids at home with grandparents or upend their work-life balance because gas and food prices have become prohibitive and average child care costs outpace rent and mortgage payments -- even for those drawing salaries.

"It is not about people making choices to drive a second car," said Diane Stout, executive director of Circles of Learning, in this struggling city two hours northwest of Chicago. "For many low income people it is making a choice for food."

The economic troubles play out one family at a time at the New Horizons Learning Center, also in Rockford.

Some parents have been laid off and must pull their children out of the day care center until they can find a job. Others' employment hours have been cut, so they reduce their kids' attendance to a few days a week.

Financial strains prompt one mother to pay with a postdated check. Another chooses to work in the middle of the night -- after putting her kids to bed -- because of the extra dollar per hour that shift brings. And the stress shows on the faces of the children who can't understand why their friends, without explanation, stop coming.

"They act out more, cry a lot more," said Diane Kesterton, director of New Horizons, where a 38-child enrollment has been halved to 19 in just three months. "They don't know what's happening, they're confused."

"I was paying more in day care than I was making in work," Meredith Hartigan, a Rockford single mother of two, said in explaining her decision to pull her 4-year-old daughter out of day care in August and switch to working nights and weekends.

Hartigan said her $38,000 office-job salary couldn't cover her bills and $6,900 in annual day care costs.

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