The Sacrifices Parents Make

Reading group at child care.

The Sacrifices Parents Make: The urgent need to fix Child Care Scholarship today and secure Maryland's future highlights the extreme lengths many parents must go to in order to pay for child care. We surveyed thousands of parents across Maryland and talked to dozens of other parents in small group discussion-oriented workshops. They told us that the Child Care Scholarship program was too difficult to navigate, they were turned down for minor paperwork errors, and that materials were not available in Spanish or other languages. As a result, parents said they had to sacrifice things like healthy foods for their family, prescription medicine, medical check-ups, and even face housing insecurity to pay for child care. Read the report to learn more and to find out what considerations policymakers can take to improve the system.