Mindy Bowman started online classes to get her psychology degree because she feels it will make her a better mom. To meet that goal, she sends her 2-year-old daughter to day care three days a week, which costs $474 a month.
That’s after the child care scholarship Bowman receives as a single parent going to school full time, getting ready to start an internship and raising two other children.
“It’s almost like you’re paying rent for your child to go to school,” Bowman said. “For a long time, I didn’t do it because I wanted to stay home with my kids; it was cheaper and I enjoy that. But then I wanted to go back to school. And now I’m realizing, wait, but I really can’t afford it because it’s so expensive.”
Bowman’s child care scholarship is part of the “largest public investment in child care” the state makes, said Laura Weeldreyer, executive director of the Maryland Family Network, a nonprofit that connects families with child care.
According to the Maryland State Department of Education, as of mid-March more than 22,000 families were receiving financial assistance to pay for care for nearly 33,000 kids.
Enrollment in the scholarship program is on the rise as care options aimed at low-income families shutter. Even as the state invests record numbers of people in the program, the model of private child care is still fundamentally broken, experts and advocates say. Child care is becoming less affordable while providers still don’t make enough money. And the high costs may be keeping some Maryland mothers from returning to work, potentially causing ripple effects throughout the economy.
“The private provision of child care is a market failure. It’s simply not profitable to care for children under 5,” Kathryn Anne Edwards, a labor economist and policy researcher, said.
The Maryland General Assembly in April passed a $63 billion budget that allocates $328.5 million for the child care scholarship program, more than five times 2024’s original amount. The budget also sets aside $218 million in emergency funding for the current fiscal year to cover shortfalls.
According to reviews of state budgets going back to 2007, the first year a line item for the child care scholarship appeared in the budget, 2025’s funding is the largest in the state’s history by a wide margin.
The child care scholarship program, formerly known as the child care subsidy, “helps eligible families in Maryland pay for high-quality child care and early education programs.” According to income guidelines, a family of four making up to $90,000 and applying for the first time would be eligible if factors such as working or going to school were met. Parents may still be responsible for some of the cost, as Bowman is.
But not everyone in need qualifies, leaving some to rely on less formal methods, like family members and neighbors, to watch their children. That leads to a system that is “incredibly unequal in quality,” Edwards said.
“The richest who command market power can afford and demand the highest quality care. The low-income who are lucky enough to get a voucher can get high-quality care as well,” Edwards said. “But after that, it’s just a real erosion of quality.”
Plus, Edwards said, continuing to invest in programs like child care scholarships “keeps the power in the hands of the market,” where the cost of child care has risen faster than the price of prescription drugs.
Still, some things have become more accessible, said Del. Jared Solomon, a Democrat representing Montgomery County. Starting in 2018, legislators pushed for increased and presumptive eligibility for the scholarship program alongside more money for providers. Participation rates have risen ever since.
“In terms of the income eligibility, it used to tap out at $30,000 or $40,000 for a family of four, which obviously in most parts of Maryland is a drop in the bucket,” Solomon said. “[We] went from being one of the worst [states] in recent years to being one of the best.”
Weeldreyer said there are two primary forms of child care: center-based care and home-based care, often called family child care. The latter is smaller, allowing up to eight children in a home at a time; centers, meanwhile, can be as large as schools.
Family child care can often be the more accessible option for lower-income families and those living in rural areas, Weeldreyer said, making them “an incredibly important piece of this landscape.”
“Rural geography does not have a critical mass of population to stand up a child care center; people are just too spread out,” Weeldreyer said. “So Western Maryland and the Eastern Shore really depend on family child care providers.”
During the coronavirus pandemic, the number of available child care spots plummeted. The state hasn’t fully recovered and is still “thousands of licensed slots” down, Weeldreyer said, but the decline is more dire for family-based care both in Maryland and nationally.
“The decline in family child care is still egregious,” Weeldreyer said. “That was not caused by the pandemic. That’s probably close to a 30-year trend.”
The situation could be worse than it seems. Weeldreyer said it’s difficult to tell how many kids are actually in child care. Her nonprofit is able to pull data daily on how many licenses are active, but that won’t necessarily reflect enrollment or attendance — child care facilities aren’t obligated to report those numbers the way public schools are.
The fewer spots there are, the more expensive those spots become. According to a recent Maryland comptroller report, between 2019 and 2023, the average cost of child care increased by 14% to 30%.
Federal guidance says families should spend no more than 7% of their household income on child care. According to data collected by the Maryland Family Network, there is nowhere in the state where families making their jurisdiction’s median income and paying the average cost of child care could meet that goal.
And yet, the expense of child care isn’t reflected in the wages of those who provide it.
Hilary Roberts-King is the executive director of Downtown Baltimore Child Care (DBCC), a nonprofit with three locations offering full-priced, reduced tuition and Early Head Start child care. Roberts-King said about 250 families use the three centers, with kids ranging from 6 weeks to 5 years old.
Because facilities “cannot charge the parents enough money to make money doing infant and toddler care,” centers need to boost their numbers with preschool-aged kids to stay afloat while taking on babies and younger children, for whom care is an expensive undertaking.
At DBCC, some teachers have been there for 40 years, Roberts-King said. But that isn’t the norm.
“Child care itself is not a good economic model. It relies on families who are at the very beginning of their earning potential,” Roberts-King said. “Unfortunately, most of the time, child care is made affordable on the backs of the teachers. And we all know that child care is infamous for its really low wages.”
At DBCC, teacher pay can range from $15, Maryland’s minimum wage and the rate for DBCC substitute teachers, to $30 an hour.
In addition to comparably low wages, child care openings often can’t compete with more flexible hours and work-from-home options offered in other careers, creating a tight labor market, Roberts-King said.
“They should be paid everything we have as a society. And we’re relying on an economic model that puts people with the least amount of resources to pay people — who are very, very skilled at what they do — a very often mediocre salary,” Roberts-King said. “Because that’s what the parents can afford to pay.”
Bowman homeschooled her first two kids until they were 5, but after going back to school herself in 2022, she knew she would need help with her youngest. And that’s been hard to find.
“We should have different options of things that can help moms because if you want us to go back to work, then we need someone to watch our kids,” Bowman said.
The Maryland comptroller’s 2023 state of the economy report notes that between 2019 and 2021, 2% of women ages 16-24 and 25-34 dropped out of the labor force in Maryland, compared with 1% and 0.4% nationally. Maryland also lags behind other states when it comes to women returning to the workforce at pre-pandemic levels.
Maryland Comptroller Brooke Lierman said her office believes that both the lack of spots in child care and the high cost of the services are a deterrent to allowing both parents in families to return to the workforce.
“Because of the pay gap, and other structural forces, it is often a woman who ends up staying home,” Lierman said. “That means that we have fewer people in our labor force, and it means that our private sector can’t grow as fast as it could be.
“Our report demonstrates that the need to solve the child care challenge is not — this is not a women’s issue,” Lierman added. “This is an issue that our economy depends on getting right.”
Baltimore Sun reporter Sam Janesch contributed to this article.
