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NYC parents, struggling to pay for child care, get ready to vote for mayor
By
Brigid Bergin
Published Oct 23, 2025
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Brigid Bergin
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Brigid Bergin
Published Oct 23, 2025
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New York City parents are pissed.
Parents with children under 6 are more than twice as likely to leave New York City than those without children, according to research released last year. Child care is second only to housing when it comes to the costs pushing families to the financial brink. Now, with the mayor’s race largely revolving around affordability, a powerful new political force has emerged: the child care voter.
So far, only Zohran Mamdani has spoken most directly to these concerns, winning over some voters.
“This place is basically like second rent,” Kavita Maginn, 37, said of the child care center where she and her husband send their 21-month-old son Ami in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn.
Maginn, who works in marketing, experienced the jarring realization many New Yorkers who've had kids are familiar with: They aren't as financially stable as they'd thought.
“I feel lucky to have a solid job but really you barely have any type of additional income for vacations and things like that,” Maginn said. “For people who don’t have corporate jobs, I’m like, ‘how do you cover child care?’ It just seems pretty insane.”
The average cost of center-based child care was $26,000 a year, according to a report released in January by city Comptroller Brad Lander. That's a 43% increase since 2019.
Democratic front-runner Zohran Mamdani made addressing that astronomical cost a centerpiece of his campaign. He pledged to implement free universal child care for kids from 6 weeks to 5 years old — and found an ally in Gov. Kathy Hochul, the first woman and mother to lead the state.
“I’ve talked to Zohran Mamdani and others who are thoughtful and want to see a path forward and we will get on a path forward. We absolutely will,” Hochul told the audience last Thursday at a Child Care Summit convened by the nonpartisan 5BORO Institute at Citizens Union. ”We just have to do it over the right timeframe with the right amount of money.”
The summit was hosted at an auditorium in the Dumbo headquarters of the online marketplace Etsy, whose CEO Josh Silverman also participated. The audience was filled with business leaders and policymakers — a sign of the growing awareness that the cost of child care represents an existential threat to city life.
Gov. Hochul has said she shares Zohran Mamdani's goal of universal childcare.
Kevin P. Coughlin / Office of Governor Kathy Hochul
If new parents keep leaving in droves, will the city only be a playground for childless adults?
“We really like our neighborhood and all our neighbors and we just see the place getting more expensive,” said Maginn’s filmmaker husband Ciarán, 38. “Everybody in our age group, if they want to have kids, they move out of the city to be able to afford it.”
The Maginns described themselves as die-hard Mamdani supporters.
Hochul and Mamdani differ on how to pay for a multibillion-dollar universal child care program, but have signaled they’ll collaborate. Mamdani has proposed increasing the corporate tax and income tax for the top 1% of New Yorkers. Hochul wants alternatives, hoping more private-sector companies, like Etsy, see the urgency of this issue.
Etsy employees have the option of sending their kids to a child care center operated by another company in their building. Hochul said more companies need to step up in the same way to help address the child care gap.
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent mayoral candidate, says he would guarantee access to 3-K and expand eligibility for child care subsidies.
Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, did not respond to a question about his child care policies.
Rebecca Bailin, executive director of New Yorkers United for Child Care, played a key role in putting child care costs at the center of the mayor’s race.
“ Parents can't afford to pay more, and providers of child care can't afford to pay their workers on what parents can afford to pay,” said Bailin, who reflected on the exodus of parents or would-be parents from the city. “ That's middle working-class families. That's upper-class families. That's our tax base that's leaving New York City… so it’s a real disaster.”
Bailin, a seasoned organizer and a new mother of a 4-month-old baby, has spent the past two-and-a-half years turning the city’s parents into a potent political force.
She began in 2022 when Mayor Eric Adams proposed cuts to the city’s 3-K and pre-K budget, reducing the overall number of seats citywide for a program that provided full-day child care and education for enrolled 3- and 4-year-olds. In early 2024, children’s YouTube star Ms. Rachel released a video, which Bailin helped arrange, criticizing Adams’ cuts.
Adams eventually relented, restoring most of the cuts and adding a recurring investment of $167 million for 3-K funding.
According to analysis from the city’s Independent Budget Office, the city spent $1.78 billion on both 3-K and pre-K in fiscal year 2024, which ended on June 30. That’s a 5.9% increase from the previous fiscal year, when the city spent $1.68 billion.
For many new parents, raising a newborn involves pinching pennies until their kid turns 3 and is eligible for free 3-K, or later, pre-K.
Rebecca Bailin, who founded New Yorkers United for Child Care, picking up her 4-month-old son Enzo from daycare.
Brigid Bergin
“It has now surpassed our rent as the most expensive basic monthly expense,” said Charles Scholl, 50, as he walked his 16-month-old daughter Lucy home from day care in Ditmas Park. He estimated they spend as much as $2,600 a month for a full-day day care program that opens early enough for his wife, a city schoolteacher, to do drop-offs and for him to do evening pickups.
“I think our plan is to trudge through until she’s old enough for pre-K,” Scholl added.
Molly Burke, 37, has a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old. Her older child is in a free pre-K program, but her younger child is in day care from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Burke said even though she and her husband work full time, paying roughly $40,000 a year for their child care feels like an “exorbitant amount.”
She and her husband have crunched the numbers, and estimate they will have “spent close to $100,000 on a kid before they get to kindergarten,” Burke said.
Even for families willing to pay the price, finding an available child care seat can be its own challenge. Dinna Soliman, 43, said she hired a nanny to care for her 15-month-old daughter Luna.
“I was trying to get into day cares when she was smaller, but there’s waiting lists everywhere,” said Soliman. She said she put her child’s name on the lists before she was even born, but by the time she heard back she had already hired a nanny because she needed to go back to work.
“ Some places, depending on their hours, you might still need a nanny depending on when they close or if they're closed for like a holiday. So it's a lot to think about,” Soliman said.
Bailin’s group has released a roadmap with incremental steps toward achieving universal child care. Her current focus is achieving 2-care, a child care program for the city’s 2-year-olds.
“Every time we can get an incremental savings by age, that’s huge,” Bailin said.
The city has already shown a willingness to experiment with what many see as the next phase of implementation of universal child care. The city’s current budget includes $10 million to pay for a pilot program to offer child care for hundreds of low-income families with kids who are 2 years old.
“ If we can get 2-care in 2026, that would be pretty major,” Bailin said. “And then we can just keep aging it down.”
Tagged
education
new york city
Brigid Bergin
Brigid Bergin is an award-winning senior reporter on the People and Power desk. She is fiercely committed to telling stories that help people engage and support democracy. In 2022, she hosted a live, ten-week call-in politics show ahead of the midterm elections called The People's Guide to Power. Brigid's reporting in 2017 included some of the first coverage of a political newcomer now known as AOC. In 2016, she broke the news of a voter purge in Brooklyn just days before New York’s presidential primary, triggering city, state and federal investigations. Brigid also guest hosts The Brian Lehrer Show and All Of It. She graduated from the University at Albany and the CUNY Newmark School of Journalism. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal 917-723-4719.
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