Like many first-time parents, Camille and Ben McDowell thought they were starting early.

The transplants from Arizona began touring Charlotte daycare centers in the fall of 2024, when Camille was about seven months pregnant. They joined two waitlists before their January 2025 due date and got on a third at a center they toured with their new infant daughter in tow that February.

The McDowells were repeatedly told they would likely have a spot by the time their combined parental leave ended that July.

But as summer approached, the promised timelines kept slipping.

And when no daycare spot materialized before their leave was up, the couple — with no family nearby — turned to an arrangement they never expected to need.

First, a family friend came across the country and moved into their home for two months to help care for their baby. Then a retired friend of Camille’s mother, also from Arizona, traveled 2,000 miles east to take over for several more weeks. Only after piecing together these temporary child-care solutions for more than three months were they finally able to secure a daycare spot.

“We should have started earlier,” Camille admits. “But still, we were giving them eight to nine months’ notice when we needed care. It wasn’t like we were showing up a month before.”

The McDowells are far from alone in their struggles to find stable, straightforward child care.

Over the course of several interviews over the past month, Charlotte-area parents described child care not as a normal consumer decision but as something closer to a strategic campaign involving timing, networking, luck, financial compromise and backup plans layered on top of backup plans.

But behind those struggles lies a system under strain, where staffing shortages, thin provider margins, low worker pay and rapid regional growth have created pressure at nearly every level.

Carolyn Hazeldine, CEO of Charlotte nonprofit Child Care Resources Inc., sums up Mecklenburg County’s child care ecosystem in a single sentence: “Everything just is so stretched to its breaking point.”

What is the true cost of child care?

Parents of young children in the Charlotte area experience the child care problem in two main ways: One, it’s challenging to secure; and two, it’s expensive.

The reasons for both problems are related.

Basically, waitlists are long because demand for child care exceeds the number of available spots — especially for infants and toddlers — and providers can’t easily add capacity because they need more teachers to open more classrooms.

And child care is expensive — according to Child Care Resources data, the average tuition for four- and five-star child care centers in Mecklenburg County is $14,926 a year ($287 per week) for 4-year-olds and $17,305 a year ($333 per week) for infants — because it is an unusually expensive service to deliver.

“Outside of their mortgage or rent, it’s the biggest cost for a family,” says Kristen Idacavage, who has been director of the Kids ‘R’ Kids Learning Academy of Charlotte’s University City location for 23 years. “In some cases, it’s more than that.”

At the same time, she says, “Parents would have a really hard time affording what the true cost of child care really is, and we would never be able to charge enough.”

Unlike many businesses, child care centers cannot simply serve more customers without adding more employees. State regulations require specific teacher-to-child ratios, and those ratios become especially demanding with infants and toddlers. In North Carolina, for example, infant classrooms generally require one teacher for every five babies.

That means labor costs consume the vast majority of a center’s budget. Providers must also cover rent or mortgage payments, insurance, food, utilities, supplies, maintenance and regulatory requirements. As those expenses rise, many operators say they face a difficult reality: Families already struggle to afford care, yet the true cost of providing it is often even higher.

So while on paper Mecklenburg’s child care system appears relatively stable — roughly 500 licensed providers, a net gain of licensed slots last year, no mass wave of closures — Hazeldine says that’s an incomplete picture.

“You’re missing the strain,” she says.

Adds Matthew Metzgar, an economics professor at UNC Charlotte: “In a normal market situation, there’s something you want, you pay for it, you’re happy. The business makes a profit, they’re happy. ... But in this situation, nobody involved is really getting what they want.

“No one in this whole system is actually satisfied with the outcome.”

Pressure on all sides of the system

The county added 146 net licensed child care slots last year, but Hazeldize says that in an area this large and with this much rapid growth, an increase of 146 slots is essentially flat. Those gains, she says, could be erased quickly by a staffing shortage or the closure of a single large center.

There’s also this: While Mecklenburg County added capacity overall, it lost nearly 300 infant and toddler slots — the very spaces most new parents are competing for.

Plaza Church Children’s Center director Vicky Dial says her Plaza Midwood center is licensed for 67 kids and has a waitlist containing about 55 names. Some infants placed on the Plaza waitlist today could be nearly 4 years old before a spot there becomes available, she says.

“I feel sorry for a lot of these parents that come in here,” Dial says, “because if it’s their first baby, they had no idea unless they talked to somebody.”

And then on the provider side, you have situations like the one at Pathway Preschool in east Charlotte, where director Emma Biggs says the center is licensed for 147 children but currently serves only 54 because of staffing levels that don’t meet ratio requirements.

“We’re running on fumes,” she says.

That’s because high tuition does not necessarily translate into high wages. Providers, former workers and advocates interviewed for this story said many child care workers in Charlotte earn around $12 to $15 an hour — roughly $25,000 to $31,000 a year for full-time work.

It makes hiring and retention a major challenge.

Says Plaza Church’s Dial: “If you can go to McDonald’s, or if you can go, you know, anywhere and make more than you make in child care, you really gotta love it in order to stay there.”

Sharon James, a Charlotte woman who has five years’ experience as a daycare worker, knows that reality firsthand. She still can’t believe how low the pay is for a job with such high expectations.

“We’re doctors, we’re therapists, we’re nutritionists, we’re hairdressers, we’re assessors,” she says. “It’s like I’m doing six jobs in one, but I literally only get paid minimum for, like, one part — and that’s it. And that’s it!”

James loved the children she worked with. Financially, though, she couldn’t make it work.

In February 2025, she left the field and now advocates for child care workers and other care professionals as a North Carolina field organizer for the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

And like Dial, she feels as bad for the parents as she does for workers and providers.

“It shouldn’t be this hard,” James says, “especially on parents — especially on new parents. You know, people are trying to make it and have children, but it’s hard. And it’s just not fair.”

The compromises parents make

Again and again, parents described to us in interviews making calculations they never expected to make — about where to live, how long to stay home, how much to spend and whether they could count on finding care when they needed it.

Mike and Samantha Tiburtini didn’t start looking until about a month after their son Ellis was born in May 2022. They quickly realized their misstep.

It was only after calling at least 20 daycare centers and spending months on waitlists that the Tiburtinis pieced together a temporary solution: a year in a nanny share. Then, finally, in the summer of 2023, they found an opening.

The problem was that it was in north Charlotte, far from the neighborhood where they had built their lives.

But rather than face years of uncertainty — and nearly two hours a day spent getting their son to and from day care — the couple decided to move from the highly walkable, historic neighborhood of Elizabeth, which they loved, to Highland Creek, a family-oriented subdivision north of I-485.

“We had absolutely no interest in moving,” Samantha Tiburtini says.

Looking back, she still struggles to believe it came to that.

“You’re being forced — or feeling forced — to move your life for the sake of being able to continue working and have uninterrupted child care. If that’s not a problem, I don’t know what is.”

The Tiburtinis’ decision may have been unusual, but the pressures behind it were not.

Before Stephanie Joyce and her husband’s son was born this past winter, they joined five waitlists, all of which told them to expect waits of 18 to 24 months. Later, she says, a center misplaced their application, which she believes cost them a spot. The only daycare they were ultimately able to secure was 20 minutes from their house — in the wrong direction, and when there’s no traffic.

The experience left her frustrated.

“Basic care for your child,” she says, “should not be something that you have to make major compromises on.”

But it also left her wondering: If finding care was this difficult for her family — despite stable careers, generous leave policies and the time and resources to research their options — what does that mean for parents with fewer resources and less flexibility?

One of those parents is a Charlotte mother named Natasha, who asked that her last name be withheld because she worries about the reaction that often accompanies online discussions of child care costs.

Natasha was on maternity leave with her second child when she was laid off, leaving her family with a difficult dilemma.

Keeping the children enrolled would preserve hard-won daycare spots and allow her to interview and return to work quickly if an opportunity arose. But child care for two children would cost well over $1,000 a month per child — a daunting expense for a family suddenly relying on a single income.

Pulling them out would save money. But if she received a job offer later, she worried she could find herself scrambling for care in a market where some families spend months or even years on waitlists.

“You feel like you need to keep paying,” Natasha says. “But then it’s like, Well, I’m unemployed, so I don’t want to be spending a mortgage — $1,200 to $1,500 a month — when I’m trying to find work. It just becomes this awkward struggle where it’s like, Do I keep them in so that I can get a job, or do I not, to save money?”

In the end, she pulled her oldest child from daycare and stayed home.

And Natasha’s experience also helps illustrate a broader point in all this: Child care can impact not just the families who need it and the workers and companies that provide it, but also the community and even the surrounding economy.

‘Invest in it like we mean it’

Advocates say there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Increasing public investment would help. Greater employer involvement could, too. Finding ways to raise wages for child care workers is another piece of the puzzle.

But the most meaningful progress, Carolyn Hazeldine of Child Care Resources says, will likely require communities to “think about child care like health care. Something central and foundational to a healthy, stable workforce — and then invest in it like we mean it.”

That’s because, as UNC Charlotte’s Metzgar argues, child care affects far more than the families who use it.

“In economics,” he says, “we call it ‘a public good.’” In other words, when children have stable, high-quality care, they are more likely to succeed in school and become productive members of society, while their parents are able to remain in the workforce.

Those benefits extend beyond individual families to employers, communities and the broader economy.

Yet the current system leaves parents struggling to afford care, providers struggling to stay afloat and workers struggling to remain in the profession. And in a fast-growing region like Charlotte, advocates say those pressures are only likely to intensify if the gap between supply and demand continues to widen.

As Hazeldine puts it: “Parents can’t afford to pay, teachers can’t afford to stay, and we can’t afford not to address this problem.”

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