How rising child care costs and return-to-office policies are pushing Long Island mothers out of work

Eileen Patterson, 39, a mom of two children and a part-time recruiter at a Manhattan staffing agency, decided to quit her job in June.

Faced with an increasingly difficult labor market, the Massapequa Park resident, who was partly paid based on commission, said the cost of childcare at $500 per week started to outpace her salary.

So, she decided to forego the office to look after her 2- and 4-year-olds even though she loved working with her team.

"My husband and I really started to look at things and say, 'Is this all worth it?'" Patterson said.

Patterson is among thousands of mothers across the country who have made the choice to quit the workforce. Labor force participation among women between 25 and 44 living with children under age 5 fell 2.8 percentage points between January and June in 2025, according to a recent study based on federal data from the University of Kansas. That’s the largest mid-year decline in more than 40 years.

The number of mothers with young children in the workforce dropped

2.8 percentage points

between January and June 2025, the largest mid-year decline in more than 40 years.

Source: The University of Kansas

A harder push for return-to-office policies post-pandemic combined with the increasing cost of child care are having “a relatively negative effect on women’s labor force participation, especially among mothers,” said Misty Lee Heggeness, an associate professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Kansas. She's also principal investigator at The Care Board, an online database that published the recent statistics from the University of Kansas.

A little more than 300,000 mothers left the workforce in August 2025 compared to August 2024, she said, a drop that follows record levels of labor force participation among women with children between 2022 and 2024. 

For a lot of moms, especially single moms, “it’s definitely become a challenge for them to stay in really any position, not just professional positions,” said Tanika Steele, with the Women’s Diversity Network, a Long Island nonprofit that advocates for equity and inclusion.

More women are finding they have less remote and hybrid work flexibility than during the pandemic, she said, and besides child care, parents also need to fund food, clothes and housing — something that’s become more difficult with inflation.

A little over

300,000 mothers

had left the workforce in August 2025 compared to August 2024. Source: The University of Kansas

The economic value of unpaid care, which is more likely to be performed by mothers than fathers, was $10 billion per day in 2024, according to data from The Care Board, maintained by the University of Kansas. 

Losing mothers from the workplace adds another headwind to an already struggling labor force that's facing an aging population, fewer births and immigration restrictions, a recent KPMG report said, noting: "A smaller labor force results in slower [economic] growth."

College-educated women with children under 5 are leading the workplace exodus, the report said. 

Quitting the workforce can increase financial vulnerability for some families, which “ripples into the communities where they live,” Steele added.

“I was a single mom for a long time, and when my kids were little, I had to choose a job” that offered the flexibility to take care of them, she said. “I had to wait to pursue my goals for a position that paid a little bit higher once they were almost adults.”

“It’s very challenging having to choose,” she added.

Child care is expensive

The astronomical cost of child care is a significant reason more mothers might be deciding to step out of the labor force, experts said.

The average cost for infant care at a day care center on Long Island is $24,000 a year, Newsday has reported, more than a year of tuition at some colleges. 

Meanwhile, costs for enrollment at day care and preschool have continued to rise beyond even the pace of inflation, according to a recent KPMG report, which found prices since August 2024 have increased at around twice the pace of overall inflation.

At the national level each year, child care expenses push an average of around 446,000 middle-class families into a lower income bracket, according to a 2024 report from the Center for American Progress, a progressive public policy organization.

“If you think about parents who might choose to help their child pay for college, they have 18 years to save. You don’t have time to save for those kinds of costs by the time your child is 6 weeks old,” said Casey Peeks, senior director of early childhood policy at the center.

Childcare expenses push an average of

446,000 middle-class families

into a lower income bracket each year.

Source: Center for American Progress

Some parents use child care costs as a key factor in their family planning, she added, “knowing that they can’t have baby No. 2 until their eldest starts school and they don’t have to pay for two child care costs.”

To add further strain to an already expensive resource, more than half of children in the United States live in child care deserts, including on Long Island, according to CAP research.

In 2024, an average of 1.34 million workers were impacted by inadequate child care each month, according to the KPMG report.

For each child care slot in Nassau County, there are 3.7 children under the age of 6, and 4.2 in Suffolk County, Newsday has reported.

Sky-high costs for child care combined with return to work policies are leading more mothers to feel the strain, said Julia Bear, a Stony Brook University professor with research that focuses on gender and negotiation.

In 2024, an average of

1.34 million workers

were impacted by inadequate child care each month.

Source: KPMG

“If the return-to-work policy is 100% in person, that’s going to certainly lead some to resign,” she said, especially on Long Island, which has a higher average commute than other parts of the country. 

Stephanie Giunta, 35, of Hauppauge is an author and marketing director at a consultancy firm in Manhattan with two young children aged 3 and 1. She works mostly remotely, but goes to the office a few times a month. Without the flexibility of her hybrid schedule, she’s not sure how she would balance work with being a present mom.

"Remote work is literally keeping me in the workforce," she said. 

Relatives look after her children two days a week and, for two kids in daycare three days a week, it costs the family around $2,600 per month.

After investing nearly a decade into her career, there was "literally nothing that could have prepared me for all of the things that are simultaneously thrown at you and how your life undergoes this seismic shift" after becoming a mother, she said. 

Remote work is literally keeping me in the workforce.

-Stephanie Giunta, marketing director at Acertitude

Still, more mothers working than pre-pandemic

Despite the drop in working moms so far in 2025, there are still more women and mothers with young children in the workforce than in 2019 before the pandemic hit, said Lauren Bauer, an economic studies fellow at the Brookings Institution, a policy research nonprofit based in Washington, D.C.

The economy and labor market are weakening, she acknowledged, “but the causes of that weakness are not necessarily specific to mothers" leaving the workforce. 

Women powered the economic recovery post pandemic, Bauer said.

In 2024, the number of women in the workforce — especially among college-educated mothers of young children — hit an all time high, leading much of the increase in labor force participation rates in the years prior, according to a Brookings paper. 

“To me, what we’ve seen over the past year is a combination of things, but mostly, it’s a potential decline from a very historic high," Bauer said. 

Data on Long Island working moms in 2025 is not yet available. But 220,131 women with children under 18 were employed on Long Island in 2024 — an increase from the pre-pandemic labor force, with 215,602 working moms in 2019, according to data from the state Department of Labor.

Some women are also able to negotiate more flexible working arrangements that allow them to stay in work, brokering agreements that might be inconsistent with company policy, Bear said.

“I would imagine certain employees, particularly ones who are very valuable to the organization, are able to perhaps negotiate those types of more idiosyncratic deals and working arrangements. But not everybody has that leverage,” she said.

Women also may resist leaving the workforce if their career is closely tied to their identity, said Bauer, of Brookings.

Younger women are more likely to identify as workers and feel “more strongly attached to the labor force, and willing to fight through having a baby and having a job,” she said. 

Callie Martino is mother to a 5-year-old and 3-year-old twins. She's also the owner of Crazy Beans, a restaurant with three locations on the Island.

"I never ever realized how challenging it was going to be running multiple restaurants and having kids," she said. 

Day care costs a fortune, she said. And she loves being a mother, but she's happiest when she's working at Crazy Beans. 

"I am going to teach my kids that you can have a dream and go for it and work hard for something that you believe in," she said. "That's something where I'm like, 'I did it. I made my dream come true.' "

Weighing the decision

Mothers thinking about leaving the workforce should consider the long-term ramifications that taking a break could have on their future pay, Heggeness said.

“Stepping out of the labor force can put you on a totally different earnings trajectory for your entire career,” she said.

Besides future earnings, mothers stepping out of the workforce also miss out on years of investment into retirement funds and risk difficulty reentering the work force with a gap on their resume, Peeks said, noting that many women view child care expenses as an investment to keep their career on track.

“If you look at the gender pay gap, we actually don’t see much of a gap among young adults without children. The gap really pops when we see people getting into their 30s and having children,” Bear said. “I think it really does have to do with caregiver responsibilities … which is still primarily taken on by mothers versus fathers.”

Resources for mothers facing that challenge include the Women’s Diversity Network’s Wealth Equity Fellowship on Long Island, a 20-week program that offers professional development to women from marginalized communities, said Steele, manager of the initiative.

But on Long Island, where the cost of living has become increasingly untenable, many families may not be able to afford for a parent to leave the workforce, Bear said.

The median income in Nassau was $143,144 in 2024, and $126,863 in Suffolk, Newsday has reported based on federal data. 

In 2023, a family of four with two children in child care would need a “household survival budget” of at least $133,380 in Nassau, and $141,456 in Suffolk, Newsday reported, referencing a recent ALICE, or Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, study on Long Island.

“In most communities, it’s really difficult to have a middle-class lifestyle on one income," Heggeness said. 

Moms choosing to stay home might be trying to weigh how much they earn versus how much it costs for child care, she added. "I think it’s a really dissatisfying feeling to feel like you’re working just to pay for child care."

Policy solutions needed

Policy solutions are needed, experts said, pointing out that child care is a “public good.”

“I myself am not a parent, but I benefit from people in my community having access to child care,” Peeks said. “Our country could not run if parents didn’t have access to child care. Whether you’re a parent or not, you benefit from the fact that people can go to work knowing that their child is safe.”

Government subsidies could help families navigate child care costs, she said, like in New Mexico, which will become the first state to offer free universal child care on Nov. 1.

A 2021 report from the U.S. Department of Treasury suggested a similar fix after outlining “several market failures,” such as parents being “asked to pay for child care when they can least afford it.”

It would also help address a national shortage of child care workers, who are paid little for the job, Peeks said.

“If we really want to build supply, we also need to find a way to really create a pipeline to get more people into the child care workforce, but also pay them a living wage so that they remain in the workforce,” she added.

There also needs to be more caregivers in policymaking roles, Heggeness said.

“Having children is one of the biggest investments you can make into your community," she said. "The next generation is going to be the next generation of workers.”