for kids not yet old enough to attend school this is the annual week of the young child an annual designation highlighting the needs of young kids and their families who are facing a child care crisis due to labor shortages in the day care industry and Rising costs a problem that drove nearly 2 million women to leave the workforce during the pandemic as Melissa Rose Cooper reports a group of New Jersey leaders met to look at possible solutions we know that over 1.8 million women dropped out of the workforce during the pandemic and the lack of child care has been cited as a significant reason why women were slower to return to work and why some women still have not returned back to work today so congresswoman Mikey Cheryl is pushing for access to Affordable and quality child care she says for far too long the struggle to find care has been forcing mothers including herself to make some of the most difficult decisions as I was paying all that money for child care and worried about whether or not my children were getting a quality support that they needed there and maybe I could provide that better I was on the brink should I keep working or should I decide to stay home for five years you know until my my daughter gets into kindergarten and I to this day will tell you if I had made a different decision I don't think I would be in Congress right now I think my path would have been different the congresswoman hosted this panel called confronting New Jersey's Child Care crisis at the learning path nursery school and daycare in Chatham yesterday highlighting some of the issues limiting access to child care and largely it's due right now because we are in the midst of a staffing crisis because too many programs cannot afford to pay really what their What Child Care staff deserve in providing high quality child care but for many families the cautious isn't affordable one parent who's a local police sergeant and is married to a teacher says at one point tuition for their two children at learning path was more than their monthly mortgage we don't know to this day how we pulled it off we don't know to this day how we still have a house and two cars new to say uh we we sacrificed and we were able to to make it work to the best of our ability and when I say sacrifice I mean there was some sacrifice involved to make those ends meet every month for us to be able to afford the child care and it's not only families that are struggling experts say a lack of child care can result in millions of dollars in loss for the business Community 85 percent of primary caretakers Express each and every day that being a working parent causes their inability to be very productive at work because of concerns and stress of child care the stresses of child care and how it impacts someone's efforts and commitment to their work go hand in hand the short answer is that we simply cannot fix the system without teachers this is an easy problem to understand providers cannot increase the rates because families cannot afford the true cost of care and since we can't charge it through cost of care we can't pay a thriving wage and without thriving wages our teachers are leaving for other Industries and without teacher is we can't produce this Supply to meet the demand of the economy members of the panel say they're also hoping the federal governments will deliver more funding to facilities so all families can have access to affordable child care for NJ Spotlight news I'm Melissa Rose Cooper [Music] [Music] [Music]