Americans want the government to focus on child care costs, not birth rates: Poll
FILE-A teacher comforts a young child in the infant room at a daycare center in Nampa, Idaho. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
A new poll finds most Americans do not want the federal government to focus on higher birth rates, but instead they prefer the government to prioritize the cost of child care and improving health outcomes for pregnant women.
Child care costs considered ‘major problem’
Why you should care:
According to the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, Americans are more concerned about the cost of raising and caring for a child than the number of babies being born.
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About three-quarters of Americans admit the cost of child care is a "major problem." That includes about 8 in 10 Democrats and women, and 7 in 10 Republicans and men.
Policies like free or low-cost daycare for children who are too young to attend public school and paid family leave are also popular with about two-thirds of Americans.
Meanwhile, the poll found that 3 in 10 Americans say declining birth rates are a "major problem" in the U.S., and only 12% say that encouraging families to have more children should be "a high priority" for the federal government.
Fertility treatment costs viewed as an issue
Dig deeper:
According to the poll, roughly 4 in 10 Americans consider "the cost of fertility treatments" to be a major problem in the United States. While nearly half of respondents "strongly" or "somewhat" favor requiring insurance companies to cover fertility treatments.
Americans aren’t concerned that too few children being born
Big picture view:
The poll shows that Americans don’t have strong opinions about whether it’s "mostly a good thing" or "mostly a bad thing" for families to have fewer than two children or more than two.
While few Americans say the federal government should make it a "high priority" to encourage families to have more children, 55% of respondents do want the government to focus on improving health outcomes for women. The poll shows that Black Americans are likely to say this, as are women. According to the AP, Black women have the highest maternal mortality rate in the U.S.
The Source: Information for this story was provided by an Associated Press-NORC poll of 1,158 adults conducted June 5-9, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel. This story was reported from Washington, D.C.