Baton Rouge area has highest child care prices amid overall rise in costs: new data

Lead teacher Candace O’Neal lead a line of dancing 2-year-olds around in a loose circle as an upbeat, marching-style song played in the background, going through the letters of the alphabet.

“H …, I …, j …, k …, l, m, n, o, p,” the voice on the radio sings in rhythm, as at least one marching child shouts along.

This alphabet dance at Central Early Learning Center is where O’Neal and several other child care workers manage infants to 4-year-olds during the gap time after naps end but before older aftercare students arrive from school.

Meanwhile, another worker at the center in the city of Central was feeding infants. Others were watching toddlers on a playground. One teacher was still in a classroom with her older students, who proudly knew their colors and numbers in English and in Spanish.

But this type of care may be harder and harder for parents to afford as child care centers struggle to find employees.

New federal data from the U.S. Department of Labor say the median price for this kind of child care, from birth to prekindergarten and even after-school care for older kids, has gone up across the country since 2018.

In Louisiana, the rise in prices has been 11.4% between 2018 and 2022. A big portion of the Baton Rouge region has, by most measures in the new data, the highest median annual child care prices in the state. 

Some southeast Louisiana child care center operators, a trade group for the centers and others say a mix of factors are behind the rising prices.

They include tougher state regulations that have boosted child-teacher ratios and other requirement to raise quality, the price inflation affecting the economy generally, and, perhaps most significantly, a tight labor market.

“We’re a labor-intensive profession, and, you know, labor right now has gone up, which is good for our staff. I mean they deserve to get paid more than what they’ve gotten historically, but that is one of the big things that’s driving the cost of child care right now,” said Bob Lansing, owner of the Christian-based center off Joor Road.