Beware the Child Care Cliff
“The child care ‘cliff effect,’ as it’s called, is a serious problem for low-income working families, says Jennifer Greenfield, a professor of social work at the University of Denver. ‘Families normally pay modest copays that gradually increase as their incomes go up, but then all of a sudden there’s this huge jump where the subsidy falls away completely,’ she says. ‘And they just can’t absorb it.’ Ironically, it often happens because the families are doing precisely the things society wants them to do—working extra hours, earning extra tips, or getting promoted into positions of greater responsibility.”