Mom Forced To Turn Down A $100K Job Because Nearly All Her Take-Home Pay Would Go To Daycare
Daycare costs are forcing women out of the workforce.
filadendron | Getty Images Signature | Canva Pro Raising a child just keeps getting more and more expensive, and for many parents, it feels like if they could just get a job that paid the big bucks, they'd finally feel some relief.
But one mom online did just that and is still finding the costs of childcare untenable, showing just how far we are from a solution to the American childcare crisis — and maybe even moving backward.
A mom turned down a $100K job because of childcare costs.
"I just declined a job offer that paid over $100,000 per year," a mom named Cici said in a recent TikTok video about her situation. She explained that she got laid off in 2023, got pregnant in 2024, and hoped to return to work after her baby was born.
"Now my baby's born; she's 2 months old," she said. "Finally, I got a job offer, but I decided not to go." At issue was the fact that the job required her to be in office five days a week, which would mean sending her baby daughter to daycare. She quickly realized the costs of that were prohibitive.
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The cost of infant daycare would have eaten up almost all of her take-home pay.
Because she is required to be in office, Cici would also face an hourlong commute each day, which would mean at least 10 hours of daycare each day for her baby. And since her baby is still an infant, her daycare costs are even higher than normal.
"I just spent a day asking around," she said. "An average price for infant daycare from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. is around $4,000 or more" each month. So she did the math, which quickly revealed an untenable situation — one that eats up her take-home almost entirely.
"Even though the job offered me more than $100,000… after tax, healthcare, and 401k, my take-home salary will actually just barely cover the infant daycare cost," she said. Further complicating the situation is that her baby is still in her "contact napping phase," in which she'll only sleep in her mom's arms.
"If I put her in the infant daycare, nobody's gonna pick her up; they're gonna just let her cry probably," Cici said. "So, at the end, I have to say no to the job offer because the salary just cannot cut it, and I also don't have the heart to send my 2-month-old to infant daycare… I have no choice but to become a stay-at-home mom."
Experts say the new administration will likely make America's childcare crisis worse.
In the lead-up to his election, President Trump shared some promising proposals to help parents with the costs of childcare through changes to the tax code, allowing parents to deduct childcare expenses from their income taxes and providing six weeks of maternity leave for mothers (and only mothers).
But the president's plan pays for these proposed tax deductions by reallocating federal unemployment insurance funds, which creates more problems than it solves. Even more problematic, these proposals only help certain kinds of families — namely those who make enough to even pay income taxes in the first place, which nearly half the population does not, and those in which fathers are the breadwinner, which is not the case in roughly 40% of households.
Low-income families have access to programs like Head Start that somewhat bridge the childcare gap — or they would, if the administration's Project 2025 agenda didn't aim to eliminate Head Start entirely. Already, the program has been one of the first targets of the administration's federal funding freeze.
Roll it together, and the new administration's plans don't remotely address the crisis, and what benefits it does provide will only help higher-income families. But even many of them won't be able to access them — as this mom perfectly illustrated. It's hard to deduct childcare costs from your taxes when you can't afford the up-front childcare costs in the first place.
Cici called upon employers to be more cognizant of the situation they put working moms in when they have such inflexible policies as the job she was offered. Here's hoping more business leaders listen, because the people we've elected don't seem to have much interest in solving these problems.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.