Supporting Working Families with Child Care

Ask any working parent, and they will tell you: child care is one of the biggest challenges they face. Finding quality care is hard. Affording it is even harder. And for many families, the math simply does not work. The cost of child care can rival a mortgage payment, forcing parents to make impossible choices.

This is not just a family issue. It is an economic issue. When parents cannot find affordable child care, they cannot work. When they cannot work, businesses cannot hire. And when businesses cannot hire, our economy suffers.

This session, the General Assembly took meaningful action to address the child care crisis with the Promising Futures Act.

The legislation creates a new fund to make targeted investments in child care. The money will go toward strengthening and stabilizing the child care workforce, supporting employers who want to help their employees with child care costs, and expanding access for working families who currently fall through the cracks.

One of the biggest problems in child care is workforce retention. The people who care for our children are often paid poverty wages. They leave for better opportunities, and providers struggle to stay fully staffed. The Promising Futures Act creates a scholarship program to help recruit and retain child care workers, giving them a reason to stay in the field.

The legislation also creates a pilot program to encourage employers to participate in shared child care cost models. When businesses invest in their employees' child care needs, everyone benefits. Workers are more productive and less likely to miss days. Turnover decreases. And families have more stability.

Finally, the Smart Steps Plus program provides child care scholarships to working families whose income exceeds the eligibility threshold for existing assistance programs but who still struggle to afford care. These are families earning too much to qualify for help but not enough to pay thousands of dollars a month out of pocket. They have been falling through the cracks for too long.

Child care is the infrastructure that makes all other work possible. I am proud the General Assembly recognized that this session and took action to support working families.