Contributing writer Clint Combs reports on Minnesota’s growing child care crisis, where a Federal Reserve Bank survey found 87% of day care centers say the industry is in crisis in 2025, told through the experience of Annel Velasco, who has spent $120,000 on child care for three children, and the advocates and lawmakers calling for universal child care and structural reform.
You can sleep in on the weekends and have disposable income. You can also have children. But right now you cannot have both.
For Annel Velasco, that punchline rings more like a line item. Like most Americans, she is stuck between two impossible choices: working or taking care of her children.
Velasco and her husband spend more on child care for their three children than most parents spend on a mortgage or tuition…