Arkansas Advocate: Child care costs preventing mothers from seeking or retaining full-time work, report says

From left: Ingeborg Initiatives Director Anna Koelsch, Little Rock Chief People Officer Sheridan Richards and Arkansas Children’s Hospital Chief People Officer Crystal Kohanke discuss workplace policies that benefit working parents at a Little Rock Rotary Club meeting at the William J. Clinton Library and Museum in Little Rock on March 10, 2026. | Tess Vrbin/Arkansas Advocate

By TESS VRBIN | Arkansas Advocate

The cost of child care in Arkansas often prevents mothers from seeking or retaining full-time jobs, according to a report released Tuesday by the Women’s Foundation of Arkansas.

The study found that the average cost of child care in Arkansas is $17,500 per year for a family with two young children. This cost is 27% of Arkansans’ annual median household income, the report states.

“When the cost of care rivals or exceeds what a second income brings home, leaving the workforce is a rational financial decision, and right now too many Arkansas families are making that calculation,” Ingeborg Initiatives Director Anna Koelsch told the Little Rock Rotary Club Tuesday.

Ingeborg Initiatives is a maternal health advocacy organization founded by Olivia Walton, a member of the family that founded Walmart. The organization commissioned the study alongside the Women’s Foundation of Arkansas, which focuses on the economic wellbeing of women and girls.

The research consisted of an online survey of 825 women, along with focus groups and interviews with 111 more conducted in the fall of 2025.

The study found that 69% of mothers surveyed said the cost of child care is a “critical barrier to employment,” and 36% said the availability of child care providers is a problem.

After Koelsch presented the study’s findings to the Rotary Club, she led a discussion with officials from Arkansas Children’s Hospital and the city of Little Rock about how employers can create policies that retain employees and support families.

The hospital’s Little Rock campus has a child care center for its employees’ children, and the center has the capacity for 150 children and a waiting list of more than 200, Chief People Officer Crystal Kohanke said. Even so, employees still leave the hospital or decline job offers because child care is out of reach for some of them, she said.

“We don’t even advertise that we have a child care center in our recruiting because the waiting list is so long,” Kohanke said.

Balancing work and childrearing was easier when the COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses to employ remote or flexible workplace policies, and federal financial assistance temporarily stabilized the child care industry, Koelsch said. Without continued federal funding, some child care providers raised their rates and others reduced their capacity.

The report acknowledges that the participants were not a random, representative sample of Arkansas women because they joined the project via “targeted communications and voluntary participation.” Researchers from JRT Research and Consulting weighted responses so the age, motherhood status and education status of the sample matched the distribution of women across those categories from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey in 2024. 

The surveys for the study occurred during a precarious time, when several child care providers were on the brink of closure or laying off workers due to the federal government shutdown and the state changing its financial assistance program for low-income families seeking child care.

Providers said the initial proposed changes to the state’s School Readiness Assistance program’s copayments and reimbursement rates would limit families’ access to child care. In November, the education department accepted recommendations from a task force meant to sustain the financial aid program, keep providers afloat and keep families able to afford care.

Regardless of having and raising children, Arkansas women’s average employment rate has been below the national average for the past 15 years, according to the Women’s Foundation of Arkansas study. The national average was nearly 79% last year while Arkansas’ average was about 76.5%.

“In our survey, the issues women identified most frequently as barriers to finding and keeping a job were concerns about work-life balance (56.4%) and inflexible job schedules (52.6%),” the report states.

Proposed solutions

Arkansas has had among the nation’s highest maternal mortality rates for the past several years, according to the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement. Experts measure maternal mortality as the rate at which women die during childbirth or within a year of giving birth.

State policymakers have recently supported increasing access to maternal health care, especially for rural and low-income women. The bipartisan Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies Act of 2025 broadened the types of prenatal care covered by Medicaid, including doula care.

Koelsch pointed out that most maternal deaths occur after giving birth, and sufficient paid maternity leave would alleviate this problem. The study found that one out of five mothers surveyed had to return to work within six weeks of childbirth, even though medical professionals recommend at least six weeks of recovery time.

Currently, the District of Columbia and 13 states have passed laws requiring paid leave for many workers, according to a report from the National Partnership for Women & Families, a nonprofit that advocates for reproductive rights, health and economic justice, and workplace equality.

The city of Little Rock recently implemented a 12-week paid parental leave policy and also gives employees time off to recover from pregnancy loss, said Sheridan Richards, the city’s chief people officer.

A 2023 Arkansas law increased state employees’ paid maternity leave from four weeks to 12 weeks. Last year, the executive branch of the state government limited its pandemic-era remote work policy but began allowing employees to bring their children between 4 weeks and 6 months of age to their workplaces with supervisor approval.

Arkansas Children’s Hospital started offering four weeks of fully-paid “parental bonding leave” for new parents last year, and administrators were pleasantly surprised that the cost of temporarily filling positions wasn’t burdensome, Kohanke said.

This example rebuts some employers’ arguments that family-friendly workplace policies are too expensive, Koelsch said.

She added that tax credits for families with children would be a helpful state-level policy. The Legislature’s Republican leadership did not bring forward a Democrat-sponsored child tax credit bill for discussion in 2025.

“Child care is an all-hands-on-deck issue,” she said. “It’s complex, and there needs to be creativity. What I would love to see is for Arkansas to experiment and to try something new that other states haven’t.”