by Kyrie Bannar, Outreach Intern
National Women’s Law Center
Experts agree that you can’t support a family on a poverty level income. So what does it take to meet a family’s basic needs? A new interactive tool from the National Center for Children in Poverty, the Basic Needs Budget Calculator, estimates a family’s basic expenses based on their location, family structure, employment status, and children’s ages. It then puts together a budget for food, rent, and child care, and gives the yearly income/hourly wage to meet those needs. So far, the calculator has been set up for 70 localities in 11 states.
The calculator can help connect the dots between child care and poverty in the United States. For more information on how states are doing in meeting families’ child care needs, check out NWLC’s report, State Child Care Assistance Policies 2008: Too Little Progress for Children and Families. The report reveals that states continue to fall short of providing low-income parents the support they need to obtain good-quality child care. As Karen Schulman and Helen Blank blogged about last week, high-quality child care can make a real difference in the lives of low-income children.
