You Might Also Like: A Better Way to Money

**Christina Eaglin** (0:00)
Are you getting a nanny? Are you getting an au pair? Are you getting a daycare center? Is it licensed? There's so many choices. A lot of times it's like, we'll figure it out after maternity leave or paternity leave. Oh no, you need to start planning that now.

**Jennifer Borget** (0:18)
Welcome back to A Better Way to Money. I'm Jennifer Borget. In our last episode, we talked to Neha Rush about taking a pause from your career to focus more on family. But we know that's not always possible. Or even maybe what you want. So in this episode, we're diving in to the world of childcare for working parents. According to the Economic Policy Institute, full-time childcare now costs more than college tuition in many parts of the country, anywhere from $15,000 to over $40,000 a year. And that's before the backup scrambles, the career hits and the mental load that nobody put on the budget spreadsheet. Today's guest is Christina Eaglin, author of Who's Watching My Baby, a guidebook she wrote built across 20 years of navigating every childcare arrangement imaginable while building her own career. Looking for a simple way to start planning this yourself? Download our free Family Finances workbook at northwesternmutual.com/podcast.
All right, let's go.
So Christina, you've built a career in media. You raised two daughters, largely on your own, after a divorce, and you've cycled through nearly every childcare arrangement that exists. So what sent you from media executive to childcare expert?

**Christina Eaglin** (1:34)
When I was in media, I had a lot of strategic planning and logistics and managing, and I noticed that there were a lot of parallels with childcare, that if you're hiring somebody and onboarding them, you want to vet them, you want to make sure they're the right fit for the group, for the culture, the whole nine yards. And I was able to translate a lot of those skills into every kind of childcare, as you mentioned, and know the pros and the cons of each one and lessons learned. And that really, really helped me in being able to help other parents who I saw get blindsided either financially or on the job or with their kids having emergencies and things like that and how they reacted to it, how they planned for it financially. So I really translate a lot of those executive skills into becoming a childcare expert.

**Jennifer Borget** (2:26)
And this is something that's really, I feel like, literally affects every parent, just about every parent. According to a Northwestern Mutual's 2026 Planning and Progress Study, a third of parents with a child at home expect to spend more on childcare than their rent or mortgage. Yet more parents are working than ever, which you think would drive more affordable options. So why do you think costs keep climbing?

**Christina Eaglin** (2:50)
Well, here's a sad truth, right? Post-COVID, there was a lot of shifting in the environment for childcare. A lot of centers didn't make it, so they shut down. And then with that shutdown, you're now decreasing the amount of places that you can put your child if that's what you want. And then if you want in-home, there became very strict regulations on the au pairs. And let me tell you, childcare is labor-intensive. It takes a lot. You also have subsidies that the government was giving, and then those subsidies went away. And so some of those daycare centers, they didn't make it. So that gave us less options to choose from, right? Because now where we had all these daycare centers, we have people leaving them, we have them closing, we have them not being able to stay afloat because they're losing their subsidies. And then just in general, things have gone up with inflation.
And so you put all that, it's the perfect storm, really. You know, it's not a double whammy, it's a quadruple whammy. It's just a really, really difficult time right now in daycare. And that's why it's really important for what type of solution that you choose, whether it be in-home, out-home, licensed, unlicensed. But it is, it's really tough and it's a lot more expensive than it used to be.

**Jennifer Borget** (4:05)
What are parents underestimating when they try to budget for child care? And how does maybe that shortfall ripple through the rest of the family's budget in real life?

**Christina Eaglin** (4:15)
I think what parents are underestimating is, they think that child care is kind of like a line item, check it off, we got child care. Just like check it off, we got the groceries, we got the mortgage. And child care isn't like that.
That's only half the equation is that line item of what it's going to cost you. There's also a mental toll that child care is going to take. Who's the person who's going to research the backup plans? Who's the person who's going to know what the immunization records are up to date? Who's the person who's going to have that one sheet on a share drive for everybody to know, here's the pediatrician, here's the allergies, here's the thing? There's a lot, a lot that go into it. So it's not just a financial cost, it's also a mental toll. And I'd like to say, it's not a lifetime sentence. It feels like it when you're in it. But it really, really isn't. It's only four to five years. You can do it. You just have to do it strategically. Yeah.