Many small business owners have found challenges in hiring and retaining workers because of lack of affordable child care, survey statistics show. More than one-third of business owners reported that workers had to cut hours or forgo work because of inaccessible child care, according to a nationwide survey by Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Voices. Although the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends that families should spend no more than 7 percent of their income on child care, many Maryland parents are spending more. In Queen Anne’s County — the county with the lowest child care spending cost — child care is estimated to cost about 16.3 percent of median income, according to 2023 data from the Maryland Family Network.
Our take: Maryland Chamber President Mary Kane told The Daily Record that child care is an integral part of the workforce as people seek to find trustworthy places to care for their children. “We have a workforce shortage on the whole and if we could give people the ability to access affordable child care, it may help that workforce shortage. It’s not going to completely fix it, but it would help to bring more people back into the workforce.”
