It’s a good thing babies are cute, because brothers and sisters, they are expensive.

Fortune reported that Louisiana is the only state where center-based childcare for an infant meets the monthly affordability test — where the cost is less than 7% of a parent’s monthly income. That’s the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ cutoff for affordability.

Before you pack up and move to Cajun country, that system, which includes vouchers for parents meant to encourage them to choose higher quality centers, has flaws, as the Fortune author notes.

The Studer Community Institute’s Metro Dashboard includes the cost of childcare as a percentage of a single parent’s income among its 16 metrics to gauge the economic, educational and social well-being of a community. In the dashboard, we calculate that using the cost of care for an infant and a toddler at a Gold Seal center.

Based on that standard, childcare consumes 49% of a single parent’s monthly income. Statewide the figure is 56%.

Looking only at the cost of care for an infant, the figures are daunting.

The median monthly income for a two-parent family with children is $5,655. For a single-parent family, it’s $3,321.

If that single parent is a mom, knock the median monthly income down to $2,813 a month.
Census data released for 2015 on median income.

The average monthly cost of childcare for an infant is about 10.2% of a two-parent family’s median income. It is 20.7% of a single mother’s monthly income.

If you have more than one child, that cost climbs.

As communities including our own look at ways to boost and supporting the quality of early childhood educators and caregivers — through programs such as the quality improvement rating system  “Stars Over Escambia” and the data-driven professional development program Grow With Me by the Escambia Early Learning Coalition — the struggle of affordability gets another wrinkle.

Phyllis Pooley at the University of West Florida, says that according to the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity, the median hourly wage in the Pensacola metro area is $9.27 for childcare workers.

That works out to $19,281 a year. At the state level, it’s $9.55 an hour — $19,864 a year.

Which means many of the very people we pay to care for and educate our babies and toddlers would be hard-pressed to afford childcare for their own children.

Paying those folks more would be good for them and their families — and would most likely increase the cost of childcare for everyone else.

It’s a delicate balance, but one the community should work to achieve.  Research by Nobel laureate Dr. James Heckman indicates that investing in high quality early education opportunities for children returns $13 for every $1 invested.

In Escambia County we invest public dollars in roads, bridges, stormwater projects, and more. We’re about to invest more than $130 million in a new jail — what is being touted as the largest infrastructure project in the county’s history.

What if our view of infrastructure included, as Escambia County Commissioner Lumon May often calls it, “human capital.”

What if job creation wasn’t just about making shovel-ready sites?

What if it was also about making sure our future workers showed up to school with the basics they’ll need to help their teachers fill their minds and spark their imaginations?

What if our children were — truly — seen by everyone in the community as the kind of economic development investment worth making.

No matter what ZIP code they were born into.