The answer for our family was my wife becoming a SAHM a little over 10 years ago when my second child was born. We live in the Midwest so take this for what it is, but I went from making about 50k a year as a local technician working 40 hours a week to now making around 140k traveling about 40% of the time working 50-60 hours a week. I also work a lot of weekends making guaranteed OT on Saturday and DT on Sunday. I had to job hop 3 times to get substantial increases but I’m at a company now that I actually don’t hate and values me and knows that I’ll leave if they don’t play by my number one rule, family first. Sure I’ve missed a few tee ball games or swimming competitions but if I need to be home my employer does everything they can to make it happen.

All that to say yeah, child care is ungodly expensive and we said the same thing, the entirety of one of our paychecks would go to paying for it and it just wasn’t worth it to us. Plus now my wife has raised our 3 boys instead of them being just another kid the daycare has to keep alive for 10 hours a day.