Stay-at-home mom Jen Freimuth had to weigh her options when she considered returning to the insurance industry after having a child.

But, she wondered, would going back to work really be worth it?

“Most of the paycheck would be going toward child care,” said Freimuth, of Cary.

Freimuth, who talks with lots of parents as an organizer of Carymomsgroup.com, knows she was not alone in facing the day care dilemma.

A new report says parents are shelling out more than ever for child-care costs. For instance, Illinois parents spent an average of $10,198 to keep an infant or toddler in a licensed child care center in 2006, the report says.

Released this week by the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, the report found that the average Illinois two-parent family spent 13.4 percent of their income on infant or toddler care, ranking Illinois residents among the 10 highest spenders in the country.

Overall, all states reported increases in child care fees from 2005 to 2006. The price of full-time infant care rose an average of 6.9 percent, while the price of full-time care in a center for a 4-year-old went up 6.7 percent, both more than twice the rate of inflation, according to the report.

The average U.S. family would have spent more in 2006 on full-time day care for an infant than they would have on a year’s worth of college tuition.

Child care is particularly unaffordable for single parents, the report said. In Illinois, a single-parent pays an average of 43.3 percent of his or her paycheck for infant day care at a licensed center, the study said.

The report concludes government needs to make child care more available and affordable to all families.

“We need to figure a way out to share the costs of child care so workers in the profession can make more than minimum wage without passing the cost of that onto parents because they can’t afford to pay more than they already are,” said Linda Smith, executive director of the national child care agency.

Government assistance already is helping many poor families in McHenry County, said Jan Fox, director of the McHenry County Office of Community Coordinated Child Care.

In September, 660 McHenry County families with 1,050 children enrolled in the Illinois Child Care Assistance program, which helps subsidize the cost of child care for parents who meet certain income guidelines, Fox said.

The assistance program’s enrollment has more than doubled since 2003, when only 300 families were enrolled, Fox said.

“For a community that’s supposed to be wealthy, there’s a lot of need out there,” Fox said.

Full text available at the Northwest Herald