BANGOR, Maine — The Maine Center for Economic Policy reports that from last year to February of this year 24,000 Mainers cited lack of available childcare as the primary reason for why they are unemployed.
According to the report, low pay for childcare workers and extremely high monthly costs that parents have to pay for childcare services were the two factors that impacted childcare accessibility the most.
Mother Bethany Smith said for her and her wife, paying for childcare is out of the question.
"I feel like I laugh when I hear people say, 'No one wants to work,' because I don't want to be a stay-at-home mom, but a lot of people can't afford to work," Smith said.
Smith recently quit her full-time job and switched to a new, part-time position because the cost of childcare is now so expensive.
She's one of the many parents who are opting out of daycare. She said it's no longer worth it. Smith used to work at a preschool—and she said she was often confused about how tuition money was spent because she didn't make much.
"I remember watching parents struggle to pay for childcare when I was in early childhood, and I thought, 'Man, where is this money going?'" Smith said. "They were paying $1500 a month for preschool, and I was living in someone's basement that I was renting because I couldn't survive on that paycheck."
Smith said childcare providers are underpaid, and parents can't afford increasing tuition rates. She said nobody wins.
Daycare providers like Haleigh Rice, who owns The Learning Garden daycare in Bangor, are seeing more parents remove their children from childcare programs. Rice said she has childcare openings for the first time in 10 years.
Rice said most of her daycare's earnings from tuition go to overhead costs and paying her staff. She said increases in the cost of living and high inflation hit her business hard, and her cost of food more than doubled within three months.
"It looks and feels like we're not trying enough and we're not doing enough, or we're taking advantage of a national crisis, and that just isn't the case," Rice said.
Rice said she pays more than $3,500 monthly for the mortgage of her building, and she covers monthly costs for supplies as well.
In addition to the monthly cost, she also has to pay her staff a livable wage, and she said constant increases in minimum wage affect everyone's hourly pay. Rice said it's not fair to increase pay for entry-level employees without adjusting hourly pay or salaries for more experienced childcare workers.
Rice said that childcare providers pay the same monthly bills that any average family does—and they’re responsible for caring for 10 times the number of children.
"I want to take [the] burden off of their plates. That’s why I went into this," Rice said. "And now I have to look them in the face and say that I’m adding a burden. It crushes us."
Rice said she meets with her families individually, and she tries to be as transparent as possible with parents, clearly explaining the challenges she too faces as a provider.
Mother Mary Spreng has one child, and she said she spends more than $11,000 on childcare per year. Spreng said she and her husband make good money.
She's a paralegal at a law firm, and he is an electrician. They both recently got job promotions, and they can't see the financial increase because of how much they spend monthly on childcare costs.
"We pay more in daycare than we do for our mortgage," Spreng said.
Spreng and her husband have a rare genetic trait that affects childbirth. Spreng said they adopted a baby girl after losing their first child together.
For Spreng, planning a family isn't as simple as getting pregnant. She said she wants to expand her family more, but with how much she and her husband currently pay in childcare for one child, having another baby simply isn't in their budget.
Spreng said if she and her husband complete IVF to have a third child, with respect to her angel baby, she would most likely have to forfeit her career.
She said daycare costs are an all-around financial strain, and parents are left to make the unfortunate decision of leaving their careers behind.
"I've worked so hard in my life to be able to have a career too," Spreng said. "That alone is a sacrifice to be a stay-at-home mom. That mom is sacrificing her dreams—you know—to be the caretaker, or dad, I should say. The parent who decides to stay home is sacrificing what they set out for themselves as a career to take care of the family."
University of Maine's Executive Dean of Business Dr. Jason Harkins said the average family doesn't have room for childcare expenses in their budget.
Harkins said the stability of the economy is waning with so many people opting out of the workforce.
"The statistics I read don't just suggest that it's more than taking a class at a community college—right," Harkins said. "[Childcare is] more than the cost of in-state tuition to come to the University of Maine system."
Harkins said families have to pay childcare costs sometimes for two, three, and even four years straight, and families who have multiple children are faced with a harsh reality.
"It just makes that choice a very difficult choice for the family," Harkins said. "Do we continue to advance our careers and hope that we can make enough additional income to make this economically viable, or does one partner or the other step away from the workforce for a number of years to be able to take care of one or certainly more than one child at a time?"
Smith said she's in her 30s and she has a degree, so it's an odd time to leave the workforce. She said she feels like employers will look at her gaps in full-time employment and ask, 'What have you been doing for four years?'"
Smith said she wishes her taxpayer dollars went to something more important like allowing moms to work without leaving families with the financial burden of finding affordable and accessible childcare.