The rising cost of child care is putting a strain on hard-working families across our nation, and Maine is no exception. The burden of cost is one that must be addressed to ensure parents can work and children can get the care they need to thrive. Providing access to high-quality, affordable child care is essential to ensuring our children have a strong foundation for future success.
In Maine, infant care costs $13,313 per year on average; more than the $9,000 in-state tuition for a year at the University of Maine. But high price is not the only challenge facing working families looking for child care. Research shows that children from families with the fewest resources and under the greatest stress benefit most from high-quality child care, but lower quality care is often the only care available to them.
The first three years of life represent a critical period of brain development. With many young children in child care each day, those important cognitive connections are being formed through their interactions not with their parents, but with providers. When child care supports close relationships between children and their caregivers, it positively feeds a rapidly growing brain, building a strong foundation for the development necessary for them to reach their full potential.
In Maine, 57 percent of child care providers are enrolled in our quality rating system, while only 15 percent have achieved the highest level of quality. That means three out of four infants are in less than high-quality care that can provide the interactions fundamental to their healthy development. When so few children have their early care needs met, it impacts the ability of our next generation to become successful adults.
Our investment in quality child care not only gets babies off to the healthy start they need to thrive, it’s also good for our shared economy. Quality early childhood programs that begin at birth can deliver a 13 percent per year return on investment, through more years of education, increased employment, and better adult health outcomes. This research also suggests that the effects of quality early childhood education yield benefits for not one, but multiple generations.
Yet our current child care system is failing to help the families who need assistance the most. In Maine and in the nation, nearly a quarter of children under three years of age live in poverty. The Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) is the main source of federal funding for scholarships that make child care more affordable for low-income working families and provides funding for child care quality improvements. However, CCDBG isn’t funded at a level sufficient to serve all eligible families, even after historic increases to the program in the 2018 and 2019 budget agreements.
Nationwide, only 4 percent of low- and moderate-income families making less than 150 percent of their state’s median income can access child care scholarships; in Maine, only 1 in 20 eligible children actually receives this support.
With an aging adult population and decreasing child population in Maine, we need to invest in our children now. If parents of one young child struggle to pay for child care, it impacts their ability simply to afford to have another child, just when Maine needs more babies to offset our aging population. By making child care more affordable, child care scholarships can make it possible for parents to grow their families.
As Congress looks to build a strong future for America, it would be wise to start with increasing investments in child care to support continued efforts to improve access to quality child care for families. To ensure working families have access to the care they need to work, and their children need to thrive, the House of Representatives recently voted to support an increase in CCDBG funding. Now we urge our Maine senators to support this child care spending increase as well. Doing so will boost the odds for success for working families and provide a path to economic independence. Improving the quality and affordability of child care in Maine will ensure our future workforce arrives at school ready to learn and prepared to make lifelong contributions to the success of our state.
Margaret Leitch Copeland is the chair of the board for the Maine Children’s Alliance.