Fargo Forum - At 72 percent, North Dakota has the highest percentage of children under age 6 with both parents in the work force.

Yet the supply of licensed child-care providers meets only 25 percent of the potential demand.

That’s why North Dakota needs to do a better job of providing quality, affordable child care to stabilize the industry and help working parents, advocates said Wednesday.

Nearly 150 economic developers, business leaders, policymakers and child-care leaders attended a conference at the Fargodome on the role of child care in North Dakota’s economy.

Despite the high cost of child care, the industry struggles to make ends meet, said conference coordinator Linda Lembke, director of Lakes & Prairies Child Care Resource and Referral.

Low wages and lack of benefits create a high turnover of child-care workers, which causes quality to be compromised and leads to an unstable market.

“We’re really trying to engage those nontraditional stakeholders to help them understand that they have something at stake in having a stable, ample child care supply,” Lembke said of why the conference was offered.