Imagine operates as an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, or ESOP, giving staff the unique opportunity to become co-owners of the organization and participate in company decision-making. In a profession often marked by , minimal benefits and , the model stands out: Imagine is the only childcare program in the country that is 100% employee-owned through an ESOP, according to the National Center for Employee Ownership, a nonprofit organization supporting the ESOP community.

At first, when she became an employee owner, Zamorano thought, “whatever, I don’t own anything.” But once she participated in the company’s ESOP education programs to learn more about the benefit, she said, “I started to figure it out, and it feels great … like you’re the CEO of the place you’re at.”

Could this business model be part of the solution for some of the sector’s longstanding challenges that make it tough to retain staff? And as New York City explores pathways to recruit and retain the staff needed to expand childcare access with its , could Imagine’s approach offer inspiration?

Breaking down the ESOP model

An ESOP is a retirement plan that allows employees to build ownership in the company through shares granted over time. The longer an employee stays at the company, and the better the company does financially, the more workers earn. The value of the ESOP is realized when an employee leaves, retires or if the company is sold. 

“It feels nice to own something, especially nowadays when you can’t own anything,” said Zamorano, adding that the ESOP is a critical tool for her future, particularly because she believes “social security is not going to exist” by the time she retires.

According to Laura Tulchin, Imagine’s chief executive officer, the nearly 200 educators at the company get a salary that ranges from $37,000 to $90,000 depending on seniority and tenure and have ESOP accounts with balances that range from $1,484 to $167,000.

The center, which has operated since 2002, became partially employee-owned in 2018 and it transitioned to 100% employee ownership in 2026. Because Imagine is fully employee-owned, any gains go directly to employees instead of to outside shareholders.��

The ESOP model isn’t new: The . But it’s gained steam in recent years: Well-known companies like and are both ESOPs.

As of 2023, there were in the United States, with 15.1 million participating employees, according to the NCEO.

There’s evidence that the ESOP model has plenty of workforce benefits. According to research from the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University, companies that adopt an employee ownership model have when compared to non-employee-owned companies. More from the institute suggests that ESOP workers enjoy higher work autonomy, are more satisfied and feel less futility with their participation in workplace decision-making than non-ESOP workers.

That appears to be true at Imagine. “Whatever your position is here,” said Tijuana Jackson, a lead teacher, “because we’re an employee-owned company, you also have a voice in the direction of the company. That’s what I love.” 

“What I appreciate about Imagine is they trust my insight … I help with the school aesthetics, I helped develop the curriculum for the week of the young child,” Jackson said, noting that lead teachers are also given a credit card to make direct decisions on classroom supply purchases.

Jackson’s experience is what Imagine leadership was going for when they transitioned to the model. 

“Our hope is that we have a competitive advantage from a business sense, by centering our employees and being a more resilient, stable childcare company in an industry that is unstable,” said Tulchin.

To be a more stable business, Imagine hasn’t just worked to improve employee retention, but it has established a unique structure, which Tulchin describes as “multisite, not tiny and not a huge chain.” 

And that makes a difference when it comes to the program’s ability to leverage the ESOP model. The childcare sector includes a mix of for-profit and non-profit models, with center- and home-based programs that range from small operations to large organizations. 

Imagine’s size puts it in a unique spot, Tulchin said. “The culture is still the mom-and-pop personal feel with the benefits that come from a larger company, where we have a recruitment manager and finance person.”

Can this shared ownership model help attract and retain childcare workers?

As an ESOP, Imagine is in a better position than most to meet the demands of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s initiative to increase access to childcare in New York City.

At the beginning of the year, the state and city of New York jointly announced the . The program is planned to roll out in phases with opening in the , 12,000 seats expected to be available in the fall of 2027, and by 2029, when the program is fully built out, advocates estimate that nearly 55,000 children will participate.

To create the spots the program promises, Lauren Melodia, director of fiscal and economic policy at the Center for NYC Affairs and one of the leading voices on the structural economics of child care in New York, said the city needs to address a core issue: retention challenges. 

Melodia, whose area of focus is explained that childcare programs face significant staffing challenges and are often “forced into a situation where they’re hiring temps, early career people, training people up, hoping that they’ll stay with them long-term, then they move on to higher wages in the public sector.” This creates a vicious cycle, she added. Centers invest in training staff only to lose them to better-paying K-12 positions.

Leaders at Imagine are working to disrupt this cycle. According to Imagine’s annual employee survey, 83% of staff report being satisfied with their jobs, and 81% of staff say they see themselves working at Imagine in two years. Despite employees’ high satisfaction rate, the business still competes with the public school system. 

Imagine gets its revenue from multiple sources, including a mix of private tuition, publicly funded child care subsidies and employer-sponsored child care agreements with government and university institutions. In a time of federal and state budget cuts and rising costs for families, childcare centers like Imagine are at the mercy of legislators and the economy, while public schools have less risk.

Even as an employee-owned childcare center with a diverse revenue model, Imagine isn’t immune to the challenges of running a childcare business.

The economics of childcare may prove challenging for ESOPs

The retention power of employee ownership lies in its promise of something wages alone don’t offer: wealth-building. 

“It lifts you up to know that you own something and you want to make sure that it grows bigger and bigger,” said Zamorano.

Owning a share of a profitable business can greatly increase a worker’s wealth and financial security, but owning a share of a struggling business that doesn’t have a reliable cash flow cannot. 

“The one factor that all successful employee-owned businesses have from their outset is that they are starting from a place of profitability,” said Tim Garbinsky, head of communications at NCEO. 

For Imagine to make good on the growth of employee ESOP account balances, the company has to remain profitable enough to have cash on hand to reinvest after covering its financial obligations. 

For many childcare centers, profitability remains a challenge. Melodia recognizes the business realities that could limit the expansion of childcare access. 

“Small business owners are always facing risk,” she said. “Any childcare center is going to have a hard time guaranteeing job quality and job security if they’re not able to charge what it actually costs to run these programs, which none of them are able to.”

New York City leaders are looking at ways to enable providers who contract with them to charge what it costs, said Emmy Liss, the executive director in the Mayor’s Office of Child Care and Early Childhood Education. “We have to take care of the people who provide this essential service.” 

Liss acknowledges that “folks who work in childcare programs face challenges when it comes to wages and benefits,” and that across the industry, teachers don’t make enough to “live and thrive,” and providers don’t have the resources to change the equation. It’s a problem that needs to be solved if care is going to be expanded across the city, and as more states like New York and New Mexico seek to provide residents with universal childcare. 

In a field rife with workforce challenges, notably low compensation and poor benefits, the ESOP model offers providers an approach to building their wealth over time. But the model’s promise as a solution to the sector’s longstanding retention challenges hinges on reliable revenue — and for most childcare programs, that requires systemic change.

For Tulchin, the economic challenges are hard to ignore. “It’s still a very low-paid industry,” she said, and while the goal of shared ownership is to do right by employees, the math is difficult when workers are “living paycheck to paycheck, and the value that you’re talking about is 40 years down the road.”

Nestling House typically operated with a dozen staff who served over 30 children from age 6 weeks to 12 years old. But the program had lost almost half of its staff and some families stopped sending their children. 

“We were operating in pods, there was less staff. The hours were less. Everything felt like less,” said Loryn Denny, the center’s executive director.

When the acute crisis had subsided and the center reopened, there were fewer children enrolled, but the leadership team decided to reduce rates to make the cost more affordable for remaining families, which resulted in lower revenue. 

Nestling House, like many other programs, was able to stay afloat with federal pandemic relief funding provided through the American Rescue Plan Act. In Wisconsin, the funds were distributed through , a program that sent monthly payments to the state’s providers. 

In addition to supporting the center’s operating costs, the additional funding allowed Nestling House to give its staff bonuses, buy new outdoor playground equipment and purchase a gently used school bus which they were able to use to shuttle kids to and from the center. 

When the ARPA funds originally dedicated to Child Care Counts , Wisconsin was able to stretch the funding and continue the payments . The state subsequently created , a temporary 12-month program that sends monthly stipends to providers based on enrollment and staffing, which will end on June 30.��

After about six years of receiving these monthly payments, the shift will be a stark change for Wisconsin providers and programs, including Nestling House, which receives close to $4,000 a month in bridge payments, split between its two locations, according to Denny. The leadership team doesn’t have an immediate plan for how to make up the shortfall other than charging families higher rates or paying providers even less, neither of which they want to do. 

Nestling House will lose close to $50,000 per year, Denny said. One way to close the gap would be to add three additional infants to the full-time program, which would bring in about $21,000 a year each, but the program is already at capacity, and they have been as creative as possible with ways to add space. 

“We aren’t going to make up the money,” said Jannelle Litos, the center’s enrollment and financial coordinator. “We haven’t given substantial raises, we have held off and then given two bonuses which felt good. It would be nice to pay more … and hire more qualified people.” Every year, she said, the team talks to a healthcare broker to see if Nestling House can afford to provide health insurance for employees, and every year they don’t have sufficient funds to do so.

“My fear is losing highly skilled staff because they can make more money and better benefits elsewhere,” said Betsy Guerrero, a director at one of Nestling House’s two locations. 

In 2025, the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Wisconsin Department of Children & Families published a highlighting findings from a survey that asked childcare providers about what would happen if the Child Care Counts Stabilization Payments Program expired.

that providers anticipated negative impacts for their childcare programs, including trouble with staffing, lower compensation, higher tuition payments for families and a decrease in their ability to provide high quality care. A quarter of the providers surveyed said they were likely to close. 

At Nestling House, leaders are concerned that many of their staff may leave. “You get what you pay for. … If I am continually having to replace a quality hire with an untrained person, I am spending more time managing adults than curating the program,” said Denny. “The focus in childcare should be on the children in our opinion.”

For Tamara Summerville, a home-based childcare provider in Milwaukee, the Child Care Counts payments have been core to her business model. She opened her program in December 2020, and began receiving the payments the following year. The monthly stipends allowed her to buy supplies, nutritional snacks and pay her staff more through bonuses. Even as her program’s enrollment fluctuated (as several children have changed residences through the state’s foster care system), the extra funds allowed her to consistently keep staff on hand. 

“I love kids. Especially in this community,” Summerville said. “I want to provide somewhere safe for them to be.” She estimates that she brings in about $800 a month through bridge payments. 

“Childcare is not promising. It makes enough money to be sustainable, sometimes,” said Summerville, but she explained that it’s not enough to make ends meet.

Wisconsin has benefitted from an historically large and there is “huge discussion about what the dollars will get used on,” said Sara Shaw, deputy research director at the Wisconsin Policy Forum. Shaw posits that the two main suspects for additional dollars would be increasing aid for K-12 schools and lowering property taxes, but an earlier deal and no plan emerged. “It’s not clear where childcare is falling on the list of priorities, but the possibility is there,” she said. 

Some that have gained attention in Wisconsin include expanding employer tax credits and and then directing some of the additional revenue toward early care and education.

Gov. Tony Evers is , so a new governor will be elected this fall. The change in leadership could impact where childcare falls in the list of state budget surplus priorities. But no immediate change is coming, so after June 30, providers will be left to figure out immediate stopgap solutions to stay open. 

“I don’t know if it’s possible to go back to things pre-COVID,” said Shaw. Childcare has gotten more attention on the national level, and the influx of public funding has been widely proven to have a positive impact. When that funding dries up, the state’s childcare providers — including Nestling House and Summerville — will be left to figure out how to balance their budgets and stay open. “What we hear is that in order to continue competing they will need to raise prices, which is pricing out families, or close,” she said. “We will have to see what actually happens.”

Every year, parents — usually mothers — toil months in advance of the summer break to sign kids up for camps, book nannies, fly grandparents out to help or sort out a medley of arrangements and schedules. Planning can start as far as a year in advance.��

After signing her kids up for all their assorted activities, one mom said she then . 

The summer months for school-aged kids are probably one of the best examples of America’s you-figure-it-out attitude toward most things related to caregiving.

Unlike in other countries, the United States summer programming experience is fragmented: You could book a private camp or one through your local YMCA, school district or church — all with different registration dates, waitlists and signup policies. Demand is often much higher than supply. And many of the options don’t run with the actual workday, which leaves parents responsible for brokering time with their employers. 

Cost has increasingly become a barrier for families looking to put their kids in summer activities, which now run about per summer per kid on average. Only about half of children whose parents want them to have a structured summer experience are actually enrolled in summer camps or day camps, according to by the nonprofit Afterschool Alliance that surveyed 30,000 American families. For 38 percent of the families that are unable to enroll their kids, cost is the top factor. The other barriers are transportation challenges, not being able to find a program, not having programs available in their community, program hours that don’t meet parents’ needs and not enough spaces in the programs that are available. 

What all of this looks like in practice is a summer camp rat race that often begins at the start of the year. 

“Summer camp, similar to other childcare and education systems, has not kept up with the reality of most children being in families where all the parents are working, whether that’s a single parent working full time or whether it’s two parents working full time,” said Inimai Chettiar, the president of A Better Balance, a nonprofit that promotes workplace balance for women and caregivers. “This is a system from the previous generations where a lot of moms were staying home.” 

The result is that summer camp falls into the bucket of things Chettiar calls “home admin work.” 

“This is part of the invisible work that women do: not only having to figure out what camps to go to, what schools for the kids to go to, doing the research, going to the tours, comparing the different schools, figuring that out, figuring out the drop off, if you need to hire someone, or taking time out of work to go do it — all of this is falling on women,” she said. “The administration of this has exploded in terms of the burden on mothers.” 

Ahead of the summer break, The 19th spoke to five moms across the country about how they’re piecing together their kids summer plans — and critically, how they’re paying for them. 

Amanda Hambrick

• New York City
• Minister
• Number of kids: 4
• Summer cost: $14,250

During the last week of the summer, when most camps are closed and parents are left scrambling, Amanda Hambrick helps put on a focused on social justice for kids entering kindergarten to 8th grade. Their 50 spots are almost gone. 

For the rest of the time, she has a mix of activities to keep her four kids — 12-year-old twins, a 10-year-old and a 3-year-old — entertained during the eight weeks of New York City summer. 

Here’s the breakdown: 

• She and her ex-husband will each take two weeks off of work, staggering their time: 10 days out of the PTO bucket each
• One week of sleepaway camp for the twins and 10-year-old: $2,000
• Four weeks of day camp for the twins at about $800 a week: $6,400
• Two weeks of acting camp for her 10-year-old: $1,400
• Two weeks of gymnastics camp for her 10-year-old: $1,750
• Four weeks of part-time daycare for her 3-year-old: $1,200
• Four weeks of a nanny to help with pickups: $1,500

The total: $14,250

By New York standards, that’s pretty affordable. Hambrick is also cutting costs by volunteering her time as a camp counselor at the sleepaway camp, and she’s going to be bringing her toddler with her to work some days a week. 

Hambrick said she’s always had to “figure out the summer Jenga,” a job that has often involved tapping into networks of moms to find the best camps and secure slots. Her recent divorce has made the labor of it that much more challenging. Schedules need to be ironed out even earlier in the year now. 

“It’s part of that invisible labor of actually getting it done and piecing it together, and a big part of that also is relationship building,” she said. “Moms just understand that you’re going to find out about affordable camps and fun camps and good camps through conversations and relationships that you have with people and with the community, and so that’s the way that I’ve been able to make our summers work so far throughout all my kids’ lives.”

Maddy Novich 

• New York City
• Associate professor of criminal justice
• Number of kids: 3
• Summer cost: $24,370

Years ago, when Maddy Novich was on a two-week trip to the Netherlands, a lightbulb went off for her and her husband. 

If they were back home in New York City, their 4-year-old would be in summer camp and they’d be having to navigate one of the most chaotic systems in the country. But what if they put him in a camp for a week while they were abroad? That way, she and her husband could have some time to do all the things their son didn’t want to do, like art museums. They looked it up on a whim and soon realized there were a lot of camp options. So they tried it — and he loved it. They tried it again the next year, then the next, then the next, each time extending the duration of their trips abroad and building summer camp into the experience no matter where they went. 

In Europe, where they usually go for the summer, signing up and finding summer camp “is much less crazy, it’s much less competitive, from my experience and the places that I’ve been to,” Novich said. It’s also typically more affordable compared to camps in New York, which easily run . 

Novich vets the camps ahead of time by looking at reviews and ensuring they have English-speaking staff. Over time, she’s built relationships in places they’ve visited multiple times, like Amsterdam. 

Here’s how the cost broke down last year for nine weeks overseas with three kids, ages 12, 8 and 5: 

• Two weeks of summer camp in Scotland for the two eldest: $2,000
• One week of summer camp in Amsterdam for the youngest: Free because it was covered for them (cost is otherwise $350 a week)
• A nanny to help for part of the summer: $3,000
• Flights: $5,700
• Other travel (trains, buses and rideshares): $3,500
• Hotel stays: $750
• Groceries (about comparable to what she spends in New York): $5,600
• Eating out: $2,000
• A trip to the emergency room when her daughter dislocated a toe: $107
• Other miscellaneous costs: $893
• Other kids’ activities (museums, aquariums, bounce houses): $820

The total: $24,370

What really unlocked this summer option for Novich was securing largely free housing through a platform called Home Exchange. An annual membership costs $235 and it allows them to swap homes at no cost with other families who want to come stay in New York. (Novich doesn’t pay the fee because she works with the company). Another plus: She swaps with families that also have kids, so they don’t have to worry about schlepping all the kid stuff they need — beds, cribs, high chairs, toys — overseas. Novich estimates they saved about $35,000 last year on housing alone. 

Of course, there are caveats, Novich said. Her frame of reference is New York, one of the most expensive summer camp markets in the country. And, because she has the summers off  through her work and her husband has a flexible tech job, they are able to go abroad. They travel extensively, so some of the costs are part of their summer budget. The family usually starts mapping their trips out a year in advance, and they share their journey . 

“The response has overwhelmingly been very positive because it’s just encouraging people to think outside the box a little bit, and saying the way that the U.S. does it isn’t the only way,” Novich said. 

This summer will be their most ambitious yet: four different camps in Spain, Switzerland and Greece, and her two oldest kids are doing sleepaway camp in Switzerland for the first time. The entire family will be gone 11 weeks. 

LaQuitta Brown

• Detroit
• Certified nursing assistant 
• Number of kids: 5, 2 school-age
• Summer cost: $1,000

Summer camp options are already difficult enough to find — and when your child has a disability, the challenges compound. Last summer, LaQuitta Brown got lucky. 

She was able to enroll her 8-year-old son, who has autism, ADHD and an avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder, in a Detroit program that caters to children with disabilities. Her son, Kermari, was able to participate in Spanish-language immersion, dancing and cooking. 

This year, he’ll be back. The program starts in July and runs for five weeks, costing her about $700. (The family doesn’t qualify for subsidies to lower costs.) 

That means costs this year will include: 

• Five weeks of summer camp: $700 
• Extra hours with a caretaker in June before summer camp starts: $300

Her husband is already stretched as thin as possible — he works every day at an engine manufacturer— and her other school-age son, who is 14, will be working this summer for the first time (the rest of her children are in their 20s). So it’s up to her to bridge the time between now and the start of camp. Brown, a certified nursing assistant, had already stepped back from full-time work to take on only on-call shifts so that her schedule could be more responsive to her son’s needs. But she still plans to take on two to three more shifts a week to cover the cost of camp. She’s also attending a few free activities available around the city throughout the summer, plus upping his direct care services with a caretaker. Before Kermari got into summer camp, this is how she bridged the entire summer. 

All things considered, she said, it’s still a win because at least there is an option on the horizon that works for her family. When he first did the summer camp program last year, Kermari had an incredible experience. So Brown kept an eye on whether it was returning this year and signed up in April — as soon as she could. 

“When you have children that are socially and emotionally incapable of certain things, but you see them happy, you want to continue that at whatever cost it is and sacrifice whatever you need to sacrifice to make sure that you can bring that happiness back to them when they’re out in the world,” Brown said. 

Claire de Leon

• Long Beach, California
• Communications strategist
• Number of kids: 2
• Summer cost: $8,892

Claire de Leon started thinking about summer camp for her 5-year-old early this year. Pretty soon, there was a spreadsheet of math, reading and STEM and other camps they were considering. She was already too late for many of them. 

The slots filled up quickly and some of the more affordable options had dubious reviews online, with parents flagging safety concerns. So she started thinking more expansively about how to fill the summer months. That’s when she thought of Belgium. Her longtime best friend moved there with her family a couple of years ago, and de Leon promised to visit her every year. What if they made that trip in the summer? Their housing would be covered and the kids could play together.

So that’s the plan: Three-and-a-half weeks in Brussels, where de Leon will work remotely while her husband takes two weeks off. Then, when they’re back stateside, she and her friend will swap. Her friend’s family will come to California to stay with them for a month, and de Leon’s 5-year-old will go to five weeks of half-day camp in Long Beach, from 9 a.m to noon.  The family will also spend a week and a half in Seattle later in the summer with grandparents who will help take on some of the care while de Leon works. 

Here’s how it will shake out: 

• Flights to Brussels: $2,120
• An overnight train from Austria to Brussels: $400
• Half-day camp in Long Beach for five weeks: $500
• Full-time daycare for her 2-year-old: $1,770 a month, $5,310 for the whole summer
• Flights to Seattle: $562 

All combined, it’s $8,892.

For her, easing the stress of summer planning meant getting really creative about what was possible within her family’s means and leveraging the relationships they had — both in the United States and out of it. 

“The more that I can approach it from not from a place of scarcity, but from a place of: What could be possible? What could we do? It really felt like it opened up these doors,” she said. “It sounds so odd to say, but thinking about going to Europe as a relatively affordable option for our very, very particular situation of having friends there was like, ‘We can do that?’ It just sounds to me like something someone else would do.” 

Meghan Hullinger

• Marlinton, West Virginia
• Outreach and community engagement
• Number of kids: 4
• Summer cost: $2,100–$2,550

In the pocket of rural West Virginia where Meghan Hullinger lives with her four kids, there is just one childcare center for the entire county. There are camps, but few of the families in this lower-income area can afford to put their kids in them. A two-week camp could run her $8,000. “I make $25,000 a year, so that’s not possible.”

In rural areas with few options, single moms like Hullinger are banding together to make it work. 

This summer, her 6-year-old will spend about a month in Florida with the girl’s father and grandmother. Her teenage daughters, ages 13 and 16, will spend the summer at home. And her 8-year-old will go to a free camp his school puts on from 8 a.m. to noon every weekday for six weeks. A friend will help her with pick-ups on Mondays and Tuesdays, and she’ll try to leave work early on Wednesdays and Thursdays, plus her 16-year-old can pitch in with childcare or she can put her son a couple weeks in the local daycare, which also takes older kids, for a couple of weeks. But that’s an extra $450 a month that she just doesn’t have right now.

Though her community of mom friends help each other, she sometimes has as many as eight kids in her house to feed — plus the extra gas to even get to the store at a time when . The nearest Walmart is an hour and 15 minutes away by car.

The costs add up:

• Extra groceries in the summer months: $900
• Drive to Florida and back to drop her daughter off: $700
• Flight to bring her daughter home: $500
• Six weeks of summer camp for her 8-year-old: Free
• Extra daycare if needed: $450

Together, that’s about $2,100 if she doesn’t do daycare, or $2,550 with it. 

It frustrates her, she said, that it takes this much stitching together to get through three months out of the year. Families — read: mothers — are just expected to make it work. 

“We’re still back in that late 40s, early 50s supposition that women are at home all day with nothing better to do,”  she said. “We are still running our nation and our policies based upon the presumption of unpaid labor, and that’s just not a reality. It has not been a reality for so very long, and I don’t understand why we’re ignoring that as a nation.”

was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of . .

Three top Senate Democrats are accusing the Trump administration and Republicans of “taking a wrecking ball” to childcare programs, highlighting the issue in a midterm year where many Democrats are running on inflation and the high cost of living.

Childcare costs have skyrocketed in recent decades, outpacing inflation. There’s bipartisan consensus on the crisis: an found that 76 percent of Americans, including over 70 percent of independents and Republicans, view the cost of childcare as “a major problem.” 

Democrats have long highlighted the issue, but many Republican politicians also agree there’s a problem — if not on the solutions to it. Republicans, who largely oppose major new spending on social programs, control the White House and both chambers of Congress, meaning that Democratic-controlled states and cities like New York City and New Mexico have been taking the lead on major investments aimed at making childcare more accessible. 

Now, in a new report, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and two fellow Senate Democrats are accusing the GOP of having “inflamed the childcare crisis.” 

The report on childcare from Schumer and Democratic Sens. Patty Murray of Washington and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, released Tuesday and shared first with The 19th, is the latest in a series of reports highlighting what Schumer says are the Trump administration’s “broken promises” in areas including healthcare, housing and energy affordability. 

Even as childcare costs rise for families, wages for childcare providers remain low and draw fewer workers, creating a shortage of childcare slots and leaving many providers in a precarious position, especially since the funds Congress passed to stabilize the childcare industry during the COVID-19 pandemic have run out.

“People in the richest country in the world should not view child care as a financial burden,” Schumer said in a statement. “Senate Democrats are fighting to lower costs while continuing to expose how Trump and his administration’s continued broken promises have led to families struggling to make ends meet.”

The report from Schumer, Murray and Warren charges that President Donald Trump and Republicans have “abandoned America’s children and families” by passing tax breaks for the wealthy and pursuing the war with Iran. 

“Trump promised no new wars and lower costs — he broke that promise and even insisted that America couldn’t pay for child care because we had to pay for wars instead,” Murray said in a statement. “Meanwhile, Democrats are putting forward an agenda that will make life more affordable for American families in all 50 states — and we’re making high-quality, affordable child care a top priority.”

The Democrats point to Trump’s comments in April, when he “the United States can’t pay for daycare” because of the conflict in the Middle East, saying: “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.”     

“The fact is that Trump and Republicans have done nothing to address the child care crisis in this country — in reality, they have made it worse,” the report says. “Rather than lowering the costs of child care for the American people, Trump has taken a wrecking ball to federal programs and infrastructure that help American families access affordable child care.” 

The Schumer-led report charged that the Trump administration has “systemically attacked and undermined early childhood education programs” with funding pauses, delays and personnel cuts at offices overseeing the federal government’s funding of childcare and , which funds early learning for low-income children. It also accused the administration of “waging an all-out war” on the childcare sector by freezing over $2 billion in federal childcare funds to five Democratic-controlled states over in childcare programs.  

Lawmakers in both chambers of Congress have introduced bipartisan proposals on childcare, and Republicans are also embracing the issue. Republican Reps. Ashley Hinson of Iowa, a candidate for U.S. Senate, and Ryan Mackenzie of Pennsylvania, who is seeking reelection in a competitive district, are among the cosponsors of the recently introduced bipartisan Child Care Modernization Act. 

“Family is at the heart of everything I do, and I’ll keep fighting to make it easier to raise one,”  

Mackenzie highlighted the rapidly increasing costs of childcare about the bill, saying: “It’s more important than ever that we deliver the relief and reform that working families need to thrive.”  

Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a fellow Pennsylvania Republican, cosponsored a bipartisan bill to expand a tax deduction for teachers to early childhood educators that . He’s also a cosponsor of the Improving Child Care for Working Families Act with Democratic Rep. Kim Schrier of Washington. 

But there’s been little appetite among Republicans for the kind of large-scale federal investments many Democrats argue are needed to make childcare affordable and accessible nationwide. Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York , the Childcare for Every Community Act, which proposes new federal investments to create universal and affordable childcare. 

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans’ party-line tax-and-spending bill passed last year, expanded some childcare subsidies and tax credits used by parents and employers, changes that experts said primarily benefit middle- and higher-income families. The Democrats’ report noted that childcare costs are especially burdensome for the lowest-income families and that “many parents — disproportionately women — are forced out of the labor market as they simply cannot afford the high cost of care.” 

Democrats have also criticized the bill for cutting Medicaid and food assistance programs, which many of the lowest-income families rely on. Federal cuts, combined with the COVID-era federal childcare funds running out and other economic pressures, have, in turn, .

“Americans are drowning under child care costs that just keep going up, and instead of doing anything to fix it, Donald Trump slashed the programs that help families afford care and gave billion-dollar tax handouts to giant corporations,” Warren said in a statement. “Fixing the affordability crisis in this country means delivering universal child care, and Democrats are fighting to get it done.”

In the absence of major federal action, some Democratic-controlled states and cities are leading the charge on universal childcare. And as Democrats focus on affordability in their messaging ahead of the 2026 midterms, candidates across the country are campaigning on universal childcare, universal pre-K and early childhood education.    

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who and is working with Gov. Kathy Hochul to phase in his childcare plan, recently made New York the first city to open . New Mexico also became the first state in the country to families last year. 

The state’s departing Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham told The 19th that New Mexico’s investment also raised salaries and expanded benefits for childcare providers, a woman-dominated industry. “It’s time,” she said, “that America embraces universal childcare.”  

“When people refer to states like ours that still have some deep-rooted poverty issues, if we can do it, then anyone can do it,” Lujan Grisham said in an April interview. “I’m not suggesting that it is a quick, 24-hour fix. … It took us all this time to build it out, but it is doable. And I think it could be some of the most important, impactful set of services and legislation for New Mexico families, and then a blueprint for American families, since the FDR investments in Social Security.”

In remarks at the Center for American Progress’ IDEAS conference last month, Warren argued that Republicans are “fumbling the childcare issue at the most basic level.” She also criticized her own party for not making major investments in childcare in its major party-line spending bills when Democrats controlled Congress for the first two years of President Joe Biden’s presidency, saying “we lost childcare because not enough Democrats who were already in office were willing to fight for it.”

“It would be political malpractice for Democrats not to be talking about childcare every chance we get, going into the midterms and beyond,” Warren said. “When I look at the upcoming Democratic presidential primary, every 2028 candidate who understands what’s happening in this country, who wants to win, and who will deliver for families, will make universal childcare a core piece of their agenda.”   

was originally reported by Grace Panetta of . Meet Grace and of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

As more discussions about supplying adequate, affordable childcare are had across the state, childcare centers continue to struggle with staff retention.

Beth Ann Lang, deputy chief executive officer of Child Care Aware of Missouri, has been working to address Missouri’s childcare crisis for more than 20 years.

Lang said there are many deep-rooted issues within the early childcare industry, but she feels that low wages and a lack of education requirements for workers in the field heavily impact turnover.

A January  from Child Care Aware found a 26% to 40% staff turnover rate due to stagnant wages between 2020 and 2024. Lang said salaries vary by area, but she said many workers barely receive compensation higher than minimum wage and rarely receive benefits.

“If you’re not being paid and you don’t have an education base to be able to do your very best, then people don’t want to stay in our field,” Lang said.

She said another aspect of the problem is that the education field is undervalued in the United States, which in turn has led to major systemic issues.

“If you’ve ever looked at some other countries and how they approach education and early childhood education, it’s much more part of the larger system,” Lang said “It’s viewed as a very important job and one that actually makes money.”

Amber Hansen, executive director of Seeds of Faith Preschool in Clinton, said she has been advocating for early childhood education to be more valued as a career in recent years.

“Childcare is not easy. There’s lots of factors that happen in these early years of brain development,” Hansen said. “We’re dealing with kids with trauma, foster kids. There’s lots of things that go into our job; it’s not just having them sit at a desk and complete a worksheet.”

Hansen said specific issues with staff retention vary from year to year, but it remains a consistent problem.

“Retention is a challenge for any childcare provider because of the pay factor,” Hansen said.

Hansen’s teachers are contracted to remain on staff until the end of a nine month school year, so her day-to-day operations are mostly unaffected by staffing changes. However, she said problems could easily arise for centers under different circumstances.

“I could see that being a problem for 12-month programs because if you have a two-week notice of somebody’s quitting, that doesn’t leave you very long to find somebody, and then you’ve got to run a background screening on them,” Hansen said.

Lang said that for the state to begin to chip away at the problems within childcare, it must stop treating only the symptoms of the problem without also addressing the main issue at hand.

“If somebody’s bleeding, you put a Bandaid on them,” Lang said. “But then you’re going to ask, ‘Why are you bleeding? What caused that?’ ”

She said she wishes legislators would try to look at the issue through the eyes of someone who works in childcare.

“I wish that every legislator would spend one day in a childcare program, whether it’s family-based or center-based to be just there seeing what it’s like, what the issues are, what the challenges are,” Lang said. “Sitting in a room of one-year-olds or in a family childcare program where you have two babies, a three-year-old and a five-year-old all running around at the same time needing you.”

Lang said even though things seem hard now, she still holds out hope for conditions to change in the future.

“Over the next five years,” Lang said, “if we are actually as communities and as legislators and as education entities sitting together and discussing what needs to change, and making plans then enacting them, we’ll be in a good place.”

This story originally appeared in , a digital newsroom covering business and the economy in Missouri.

“What we want is that, if and when families need it, there’s childcare that’s available, that works for their needs, that’s affordable and high quality,” said Anne Hedgepeth, senior vice president of policy and research at Child Care Aware of America. “We’re seeing a lot of gaps in that promise right now.”

To get federal childcare funding, states have to put a minimum amount of their own money into the system as well. But of state funding for childcare and preschool in fiscal year 2026, conducted by Child Care Aware of America, found that seven states — Arkansas, Idaho, Missouri, Nevada, Rhode Island, West Virginia and Wyoming — don’t spend any money above that bare minimum. And a handful of states don’t spend more of their own money on preschool than what is strictly required: Arizona, Idaho, Montana, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. Idaho and Wyoming find themselves on both lists, putting nothing extra into either system. 

The lack of additional investment has a lot of root causes, from political hesitance to the realities of state budgets, which must be balanced every year, Hedgepeth said. In part, she said, the problem stems from the end of federal funding from the American Rescue Plan Act, which infused billions of dollars into the system and allowed states to make but has since disappeared. Other constraints include a reduction in tax revenues and cuts to federal programs stemming from the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill package that passed last year. 

No matter its source, the lack of funding creates “a frustration for parents and families and childcare providers on the ground,” Hedgepeth said. Without more state investment, legislatures are unable to improve the system by, for example, expanding their subsidy programs to reach more families — or even to serve all eligible ones — or reimbursing providers the amount it actually costs to care for children instead of at lower rates. That has led to over a dozen states recently instituting or expanding waiting lists for childcare subsidies, leaving parents to try to pay for care out of pocket. The waitlists hurt providers, too, if they can’t enroll new families, which can lead to closures of classrooms and even entire programs. “The whole system suffers,” Hedgepeth said. 

State spending disparities have also created an uneven national system that leaves parents better or worse off depending on where they live. The study analyzed total investments for each child under age 5 for 37 states and found that spending ranged from less than $500 per child under age 5 to more than $5,000 per child. Eleven states spend between $1,500 and $9,900 per child, with Washington, D.C. spending the most. 

“We do have really different experiences state-to-state, based in part, on what states are putting into their childcare and early learning systems,” Hedgepeth said. That creates frustration for families, especially those who move between states and have to navigate such different systems. But it hurts everyone. “It also really presents a challenge when we think about having an overarching goal when it comes to child development and support of our earliest learners,” she said. Children arrive at kindergarten with a variety of readiness levels depending on what was available to their families before then, she pointed out. That necessitates instituting “a more robust floor” so that there is a baseline across the whole country.

Hedgepeth sees a silver lining: In the states that are failing to spend more of their own funding, “there is room for these states to do more and maybe even an appetite.” Some of them signaled in their recent legislative sessions that they want to invest more, she said. of governors talked about childcare and early childhood education in their state of the state addresses this year. She also noted that, since the pandemic, all states are at least fully meeting the federal match requirement for childcare funding, even if many aren’t going above and beyond. There were some years before 2020, mostly in “extraordinary circumstances,” such as a recession or budgetary challenge, when some states did not even spend that much, she said.

Even so, some states are moving in the wrong direction. Child Care Aware of America found that six states — Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Rhode Island — decreased how much of their own money they spent on childcare and preschool in fiscal year 2026 compared to fiscal year 2025. West Virginia invested in childcare in fiscal year 2025 but then failed to do so in fiscal year 2026. 

According to from Child Care Aware of America, this lack of state spending has led to the first decline in the number of licensed childcare centers in several years. In the years directly after the height of the pandemic, between 2021 and 2023, childcare supply experienced “robust growth,” Hedgepeth said, after states made investments that “paid off in terms of making it possible for childcare programs to open.” But between 2024 and 2025, the number of licensed centers declined by 1%. 

Hedgepeth cautioned that the data is messy and the drop is “very, very small.” Still, she said, “It is very clear to us that we are not moving in the direction we need to be moving.” of American children already live in childcare deserts, according to a report from the Center for America Progress. In states that aren’t spending enough for providers to be able to open and operate with some semblance of financial stability, “the supply trend is going to continue in the wrong direction,” she said. 

This is especially concerning given that state budgets are about to enter a particularly rough patch. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act enacted the to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid in history, cuts that state budgets have to absorb. The possibility that states will feel forced to further pull back from childcare and early childhood education funding in order to cover for some of those reductions is “very much on the horizon,” Hedgepeth said. While some states started to worry about the problem in their most recent sessions, next year’s legislative sessions are where the cuts are likely to really hit home, she said. “We’re looking at a tough several years.” 

Congress can act by increasing funding for childcare programs, something it has with . “It’s very clear that the gap is there and it needs to be closed,” Hedgepeth said. “We have a very direct call to action here, which is, ‘Let’s make investments to make sure we grow the supply for childcare.’ ”

Tucked in New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s sprawling universal childcare plan is a little-talked-about milestone: In September, the city will open what appears to be the first free daycare for municipal workers in the country. 

The center, called , is a pilot program that could prove to be a model for cities across the country that are childcare curious, but not ready to take the big universal swing. 

Housed in a renovated space on the first floor of the David N. Dinkins Municipal Building in Manhattan, home base for more than 2,000 city workers, the Little Apple will offer free care to the kids of full-time staff. All workers in the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), a city government support agency, can also take advantage of it regardless of their work location.

The center will be small — just 40 seats for children ages six weeks to 3 years old. To pay for it, the city budgeted about $1.5 million, or $35,000 per child.

“This is what Wall Street could call a good investment,” Mamdani . “We know that after housing, the cost of childcare is what is pushing working families out of this city.” 

DCAS Commissioner Yume Kitasei told The 19th said the solution came about as a retention strategy, responding to the needs workers shared. In surveys, workers enthusiastically embraced the idea. One worker described access to free childcare as “life-changing.”

That’s probably not hyperbole. Childcare affordability is a national problem that has only grown more acute. Childcare costs an average of nationwide; in New York for an infant at a center it’s closer to on average. Paying for a daycare now vies with housing costs as , so much so that some parents have had to move or . 

Cities, meanwhile, have been since the pandemic. Benefits like childcare, which some cities and private companies have dabbled with, can help address the quality-of-life issues that are pushing workers out of jobs. 

“This is a great time for us to sort of be thinking about: How can we make our jobs even more attractive to people and also retain the city workers that we have?” Kitasei said. “This is one piece of that puzzle.” 

Kitasei added that a “healthy” number of staffers applied for The Little Apple and the department expects to fill its 40 childcare seats. Anyone who doesn’t get a spot will be put on a waitlist.

There is an appetite across the country for childcare solutions that could help bring down costs for certain workers, and cities are already taking on creative fixes. 

Several already have childcare centers in municipal buildings or for city employees, including , , and , Colorado, though none of them are free like New York’s. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, the county school district and a local childcare center known nationally have partnered to provide childcare for the children of teachers inside unused classrooms in schools. Boone County, Missouri, is . 

In the private sector, and closed longstanding childcare centers they operated on their campuses in recent years, but efforts continue elsewhere. Patagonia has operated at its California headquarters since the 1980s, a move it argues has lowered turnover from employees who use the site by 25%. Overstock.com also has an at its Utah headquarters. Both are subsidized, not free.��

“As cities in every region of the country compete with the private sector and other municipalities to attract and retain workers and elected officials, ensuring access to childcare offers an opportunity for local governments to build a representative workforce and invest in the future of their communities,” said Quincy Midthun, an outreach specialist with the Mayors Innovation Project at the High Road Strategy Center, a think tank focused on solutions to social problems.

The Little Apple, and New York City broadly, reflect a when it comes to childcare. 

The announcements of universal childcare in New York City and in the last year received an enormous amount of attention across the country. Both places took an idea that for many years was floated as a pipe dream — treating childcare similarly to public education — and turned it into reality. In New York, it’s one of the few issues that Mamdani, a Democratic socialist, and Gov. Kathy Hochul, a centrist Democrat, . 

Voters are also hungry for more solutions: In poll after poll, they assert that spending money on childcare is a . 

Emmy Liss, who heads Mamdani’s childcare office, said childcare is at a “political tipping point.” 

“We’re in this moment where folks across all political, socioeconomic, demographic spectrums recognize that childcare is essential, that childcare is something families are struggling to access, and know that the market economics of childcare don’t work without public investment,” Liss said. “We see recognition of that.”

With Little Apple, New York is testing what it looks like to commit to its promises of free care for all, but doing it first for its own employees. 

“If we are asking folks to report to work in person in parts of the city where childcare is expensive, as it is all over the city, I think that we have to recognize that childcare is an important part of how we keep people in the workforce,” Liss said. 

Mamdani and Hochul have been working to make childcare universally available to children in the city through a phased rollout set to conclude in four years. For 2-year olds, the mayor announced that will be available in the fall in four largely low-income areas of the city. Another 12,000 are planned for 2027. For 3-year-olds, about 2,000 new seats will be added in the fall, as well. The city has an existing universal childcare program for 4-year-olds. 

Universal childcare as Mamdani envisions it will cover kids ages 6 weeks to 5 years with a price tag of about $6 billion annually, making it the most expensive pillar of his affordability agenda. Mamdani is expected to push to fund the program with a tax increase on the wealthy, a strategy Hochul for, though the state is . Mamdani has not yet unveiled what his universal childcare program would look like for infants and young toddlers.

How New York City’s program rolls out and its sustainability are being closely watched by proponents of universal care, who argue it’s also an anti-poverty measure.

“We know that other places are watching as we try different things out, including the work at the Little Apple,” Liss said.

In New York City, 21% of working parents experienced some kind of childcare hardship in 2024 that forced them to forgo care or use inadequate care, particularly families living in poverty, single mothers and Black parents, from Robin Hood, an anti-poverty organization, and Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy.��

An average of 3,400 2- and 3-year-olds were pushed into poverty between 2022 and 2024 specifically due to the cost of childcare, a from the same organizations found. An estimated 4,100 2- and 3-year-olds would be lifted out of poverty each year if they had access to universal 2-K and 3-K education. That would reduce poverty for this age group .��

Rebecca Bailin, the executive director of the parent organizing group New Yorkers United for Child Care, said the problem has reached such a fever pitch that thousands of parents started to organize around the issue in 2023 and helped push the agenda that was central to Mamdani’s election. 

Bailin, who has a 1-year-old, said she can now depend on a 3-K program when her child turns 3 and likely a 2-K program, as well — a savings of about $100,000. The 2-K program Mamdani is rolling out will also be full-day care rather than partial-day care that wraps up around 2 p.m. like the existing 3-K program, addressing a top ask from parents.

“People are stoked,” Bailin said. “People feel like they can stay in the city.” 

The Little Apple is a small part of the larger effort, but, “if we want to retain people, we have to do this,” Bailin said. 

“This is something we want to see scaled. If city workers can’t afford to live here, that’s a real problem,” she continued. “This is really critical and we need this for everybody.” 

was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of .

The law’s passage followed nearly two decades of groundwork and an eight-year advocacy campaign led by Let’s Grow Kids, a local organization focused on building broad public and political support for childcare reform. The mission? To achieve high-quality, affordable childcare for the whole state. 

A from New America chronicles the years of advocacy and organizing that paved the way for Vermont to pass Act 76, including the incremental legislative strategy that developed bipartisan support; efforts to build a coalition of stakeholders; and the strategic pivots and political organizing that were instrumental in passing the law. By recounting Vermont’s roadmap, the report’s author, Rebecca Gale, who has been covering childcare in the state for years, shares lessons learned to highlight what’s possible when it comes to state-led childcare reform. 

Here’s a look back at Gale’s reporting on some of the key actions and policy changes that have led to progress in Vermont.

While childcare has gained visibility in political campaigns, it’s more often a secondary issue, rather than a key priority for candidates. That may be starting to change. In April, Aly Richards, who led Let’s Grow Kids for nearly a decade, announced her bid for governor. In an interview with Gale, Richards discussed why the governor’s office might be the best next step for someone who knows how central quality childcare is for families — and states — to thrive.

Let’s Grow Kids, a nonprofit organization formed in 2015 to improve Vermont’s childcare infrastructure, sunset its operations in October 2025. According to its CEO, it was always intended to be dismantled after a decade, and the sunset strategy was critical to its success in spurring change. Here’s an inside look at how the organization’s efforts drove progress that led the state to make childcare more accessible and affordable, and why the time-sensitive nature of Let’s Grow Kids was key to its success.

Act 76, a law which passed in Vermont in 2023, has been a game changer for many of the state’s childcare providers, offering a notable financial boost. For some, it’s doubled their income. The law, which was designed to increase access to high-quality childcare for families and to support the state’s early care and education workforce, has had a number of successes in its first year of implementation. Here’s a look at how family childcare providers in the state have been impacted.

In June 2023, Vermont’s legislature overrode Republican Gov. Phil Scott’s veto to approve a number of state-wide priorities, including $125 million to shore up its childcare infrastructure. The state’s successful effort followed more than a decade of advocacy and grassroots organizing focused on strengthening its childcare system. The law, , expanded childcare subsidies to reach more families and increased wages for providers. Supporters view Vermont’s approach as a national model for expanding affordable, accessible child care and strengthening the workforce.

In June 2023, Vermont’s Republican Gov. Phil Scott vetoed a bill to strengthen the state’s childcare system, but even after the governor’s veto, the state legislature had sufficient support to consider an override. Richards, CEO of Let’s Grow Kids, said the decision to veto could be traced back to a campaign promise not to raise taxes. Without the payroll tax increase, the program could not afford to pay providers more. “The Governor agrees childcare is essential but won’t raise taxes. Those two things cannot live together. The solution is public investment. We know this is hard work. That is why we have a bipartisan movement. We are making hard choices together, but we are doing so responsibly,” Richard said.

As the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc across the globe, many states across the U.S. were navigating childcare setbacks. But in May 2021, after years of advocacy and organizing around strengthening childcare, Vermont passed , key legislation to reform childcare in the state. Despite the groundswell of political will for the program, Vermont still faces major funding hurdles. Gale offers a look into the state’s progress and challenges.

On Friday, New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed into law, which allows retirees taking care of children to access the state’s childcare assistance program.

For eligible families, the NH Child Care Scholarship Program provides funds for childcare through direct payments to daycare and out–of–school time providers for children up to 13 years old, and through 17 for a child with disabilities.

SB 608 requirement for kinship caregivers who are retired and at federal retirement age. Previously, parents and guardians were required to be working, looking for work, in a training program, or in school. Families still have to meet state income eligibility requirements, which require them to make 85% or less of the state median income to qualify.

The law also requires the state to ask the federal government if family care support services are “an allowable service” under the Acquired Brain Disorder, Choices for Independence, and Community-Based Service waiver programs.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com.

California is doing something about diaper insecurity for its residents. Gov. Gavin Newsom that the state will provide 400 free diapers to families with newborn babies, beginning with hospitals that predominantly serve low-income households, before expanding more broadly.

Diaper need is a serious challenge for many families. of U.S. households with children under age 4 in diapers report diaper insecurity, according to a nationally representative study from the nonprofit National Diaper Bank Network. An infant typically goes through diapers in a day. At , the annual diaper cost for one baby can run roughly $1,000 during the first year. These costs hit during a period when families are often due to the combination of baby-related costs and employment challenges driven in part by America’s .��

The consequences can be harmful: When parents can’t afford enough diapers, they may turn to alternatives like using plastic bags or towels to make their own diapers, or reusing wet or soiled diapers. These practices can lead to severe diaper rash and urinary tract infections. In my work, I have spoken to childcare providers who describe the phenomenon of “Monday morning rash,” when babies arrive after having diapers stretched over the weekend.

Cloth diapers present an alternative that can save parents a lot of money, but they for many families because they require up front costs, need frequent laundering — which can increase utility bills — and importantly, because many center-based childcare programs won’t allow them.  

In fact, many childcare providers require parents to provide disposable diapers, and if they’re unable to do so, they may not be allowed to drop their children off. In of Connecticut diaper bank users, more than half of parent participants who relied on childcare programs reported missing work due to a lack of diapers, with an average of four missed days per month.

While the long-term solution to diaper need likely lies in ensuring all families have access to reliable and well-paying jobs, a statewide program like California’s Golden Gate Start can provide a strong preventative intervention that can set families off on the right foot, helping them leave the hospital with one less worry while they try to figure out how to care for the beloved, squalling creature that’s coming home without an instruction manual. In practice, the 400 diapers, which come in varying sizes, should cover about a month’s supply.

California is not the first state to try to tackle diaper insecurity. Illinois has, since 2023, been utilizing Diaper Dollars, a statewide initiative that sends out a monthly $40 e-card to eligible families that can be used to purchase diapers at various stores, and the idea has since spread to Ohio. In 2024, Tennessee to families enrolled in the state’s Medicaid system, although the program is being as the state legislature tries to shore up healthcare budget holes. 

California’s model, though, may have the most straightforward delivery system. Diaper Dollars has faced challenges because the stipends can only be used at participating stores and some major retailers don’t currently accept that form of payment, while Tennessee struggled with coverage because it delivered the benefit via pharmacies, and left many families lacking options. California’s use of hospitals is innovative, though it does mean only a one-time infusion of diapers versus an ongoing supply.

Despite the fact that California’s program seems like a clear win, it has . While plausibly driven by animus toward Newsom, a , commentators have focused on the fact that a nonprofit with connections to Newsom’s wife, Baby2Baby, is involved in the administration of the free diapers. Some see Newsom’s free diaper program as politically flashy but economically tokenistic, that giving new parents 400 diapers does little to solve the real reason California feels unaffordable — especially the state’s severe housing shortage and high cost of living. Others suggest routing diapers through a nonprofit and hospitals may cost taxpayers more than simply handing families cash directly.

This argument almost entirely misses the point. While it’s always worth watching the implementation of a benefit to make sure the government is working efficiently, the question on the table is whether there is a public interest in helping all parents and babies get off to a strong and healthy start. As conservative analyst Patrick T. Brown in his Family Matters Substack, “even if the program design could theoretically stand to be improved, it hardly deserves the scorn being directed at it. … Sometimes a program can be good without being perfect; and sometimes we should do a better job resisting the temptation to hold our political opponents’ ideas to a higher standard than our own side’s.”

Indeed, American families would surely welcome a race among states to figure out how to most effectively support them in securing an adequate diaper supply. Babies need diapers, but especially as the cost of living continues to rise, not every American family is in a position to provide them. California is taking action: That in itself is worthy of praise — and one way or another, there will be important lessons to learn.

This mismatch between families’ current realities and ideal scenarios begins early — as soon as their children are born, when the parental leave they are able to take is often less time than they want. 

It may not be altogether surprising that parents in the United States are not satisfied with their leave, care and work options. After all, it is one of the only developed nations that a national paid-leave program for new parents, and in this country is unaffordable and inaccessible to many families. 

Still, these findings add an important dimension to the conversation about raising children in America: The survey is nationally representative and the largest-of-its-kind, reaching about 5,500 parents and primary caregivers with children from birth to age 5, including nearly 3,000 parents with household income below 200% of the federal poverty level or about $66,000 or less for a family of four. 

But it’s more than that, said Alyson Silkowski, senior policy adviser at the New Practice Lab, a team focused on improving economic outcomes for American families with young children, and one of the authors of the report. 

“There’s a lot we know about what’s not working,” Silkowski said of earlier data and surveys on families. “We were keen to add to this conversation about parenthood in America — what it is parents actually want as they think about these early years.”

The simplest answer to what parents want, they found, is more time and more money. 

Nearly three in four parents said they want more quality time with their children, such as playing, being outside and traveling. Instead, they feel much of their “free” time is spent doing housework such as cooking and cleaning. These findings hold across income levels, geography, race and ethnicity.

More than half of parents — 55% — said they wanted more time off with their child after they were born, and that’s true for both moms and dads. 

“Neither are getting what they want,” Silkowski noted. 

Priscilla Welsh, a mom of two living in a suburb of Denver, lost her job while pregnant with her first child a few years ago after the company that employed her went out of business. When their son was born, Welsh was not working, and her husband, who is self-employed, “took a pause” from work to be at home with his family, she shared. 

“It was a rougher period of very tight finances with our firstborn,” she said. “You want to snuggle your newborn and feel relaxed, but it was top of mind for me — how little money we had.”

When Welsh had their second child, in 2025, her husband was able to take advantage of Colorado’s state paid parental leave program, which was approved by voters in 2020 and became available to families in early 2024. He was able to take 12 weeks of paid leave to be at home with his wife, toddler and newborn son, which Welsh described as “amazing.” 

As for money, the New Practice Lab found that financial concerns seem to be leading families to choose work and childcare arrangements that do not reflect their preferences. 

Nearly nine in 10 parents said they want to work some amount, including 91% of dads and 85% of moms, but 75% said their current work arrangement is not one they want. 

Welsh has not returned to the workforce since she lost her job during her first pregnancy, but she would like to if she can find the right position, she said. Ideally, she’d work one day a week in an event-planning role. She loves the challenge-and-reward cycle of paid work, and she also thinks it would be good for her as a parent. 

“I want to miss them,” she said of her sons, who are 2.5 years and 10 months old. “[Working] would help me miss them and be a better mom when I’m around them.”

She added: ““Being a mom is just one challenge after another after another. But there’s no big reward. It’s like, ‘Potty training is over!’ But no, potty training is never over.” 

In her paid jobs of the past, Welsh would work really hard to complete a task or a project, then get appreciation and acknowledgement for it, she said — “rather than being a parent, where you’re never finished.” She thinks that returning to the labor force would “stretch” her in a good way.

The main reason she isn’t working now is because she isn’t looking — because she doesn’t think that what she is seeking is even out there. 

“Part of me just doesn’t believe it exists, or that I’d be paid high enough that it would be worth my time,” she said. 

Many moms — and some dads — with young children seem to share Welsh’s desire for more flexible, part-time work. 

Of the parents who said they prefer to work, 30% of moms and 64% of dads said they want to work full-time, compared to 28% of moms and 15% of dads who want flexible work and 25% of moms and 12% of dads who want part-time work.��

About a third of respondents said they preferred to care for their children themselves in their ideal scenario, while 19% wanted a combination of care, 18% wanted another parent to do the caregiving, 15% wanted formal settings, 11% wanted a relative or friend, and 5% wanted a nanny or sitter.��

“There wasn’t a single solution that crossed the 50% threshold,” noted Amira Choueiki Boland, chief of staff at the New Practice Lab and an author of the report.

Boland also acknowledged that many families seem to have modest expectations for what can change about their circumstances — whether it’s more parental leave or more satisfying work and childcare arrangements. 

“We’re conditioned to what we think is possible,” Boland said, recalling how “astounded” she was to observe the system of support in place for colleagues who took parental leave when she worked in Canada. “[We should be] opening up our aperture to what other societies have figured out to make this work better.”

Mary Moody bought Silver Bluff Kids Early Learning Center in 2023, one of in western North Carolina at the time. The owners cited insufficient childcare subsidy funding.

Today, the Canton center, where around 75% of children rely on child care subsidy funding, is facing the same challenge, Moody said.

“The price of groceries, the price of supplies and materials, our insurance costs, like everything has increased … except our subsidy reimbursement rates,” she said.

Childcare programs need more subsidy funding, advocates say, to make ends meet and serve low-income working and student parents. Advocates are asking for $101 million this short legislative session to increase the rates facilities receive through , which helps afford care.

“It’s about stabilizing the childcare sector right now, because before we can even think about expanding childcare programs, we have to sustain what we have,” said Leanna Martin, director of early childhood policy and research at nonprofit .

Since the state legislature passed a full budget in 2023, the state has experienced a net loss of 262 licensed programs, according to from the Gov. Josh Stein’s office.

In March, Stein’s “critical needs budget” for the rest of the fiscal year.

Legislators went home last fiscal year without passing a full budget. Both the and proposals included around $80 million per year in subsidy funding to update rates.

Without increased subsidy funding, childcare will continue to become less accessible and more expensive, said Dan Rockaway, president of the and CEO of Sounds and Colors, which has four childcare centers in Wake and Orange counties.

“It’s what keeps parents in the workforce and classrooms open,” Rockaway said. “But to truly work, subsidy rates also need to be better aligned with the actual cost of providing high-quality care, otherwise the gap continues to grow and access remains out of reach for too many families.”

‘In free fall’

Many childcare programs have had to make up for the loss of pandemic relief funding, which ran out in March 2025. The state encouraged programs to use that funding to increase teachers’ wages. When the money ran out, providers have had to find other ways to fill the gap and retain staff.

In Moody’s case, she has chosen not to hire an extra “floater” in order to maintain her staff’s wages. Instead, her and her assistant director fill in to maintain required child-to-staff ratios when a teacher is out.

“That makes things really challenging now, really tight, and it has been since March of last year,” she said.

Moody said she could raise tuition rates, but she knows parents cannot afford to pay more. Since her program is operating a waitlist, she has considered opening another center in the area to meet the demand.

“But again, that’s the problem, is the funding,” she said. “I mean, the funding just isn’t there.”

, which Stein established last year, has been studying funding and policy solutions to high costs and low access.

The group in January 2026, including creating a statewide subsidy floor, providing childcare for childcare employees, and offering childcare to public sector workers. The group has also discussed creating an endowment that multiple entities may contribute to.

Incremental changes will not be enough to recruit and retain teachers, said Henrietta Zalkind, director of the Down East Partnership for Children, a local Smart Start partnership serving young children and families in Nash and Edgecombe counties.

“The system is in free fall,” said Zalkind, a long-time early childhood advocate. “And we need to acknowledge where we are.”

She said direct funding to increase teachers’ wages would make the largest difference in the short-term, pointing to of education-based wage supplements from the from nonprofit Early Years. Child care teachers in North Carolina made an average of $14.20 an hour in 2024, .

What difference would higher subsidy rates make?

Right now, the rates programs receive cover less than half of the actual cost of care, according to from Candace Witherspoon, director of (DCDEE).

Higher subsidy rates would help child care programs relying heavily on the program keep their lights on, Martin said.

“It brings consistency into the system … and reduces that market volatility to ensure providers receive a reliable baseline that more closely reflects the cost of care,” she said.

The $101 million ask would establish a floor rate for infants and toddlers based on a and increase rates for 3- to 12-year-olds based on . The floor rate would mean all facilities serving infants, 1-year-olds, and 2-year-olds would receive, at minimum, the average statewide rate based on age and quality level.

The based on location, quality rating, and age. Martin pointed to Randolph County, which receives $867 per infant in a five-star setting. In neighboring Davidson, programs receive $1,236 for serving the same age child at the same quality level. A floor rate would increase rates in Randolph County by $600 per child per month, Martin said.

Advocates in called for a floor for all ages. This session’s ask prioritizes care for infants and toddlers because it is the most expensive and hardest to access across the state. Establishing a floor would nearly double the amount many rural providers receive to care for the youngest children, Martin said, and send about $27 million to programs in rural communities.

“(The request) is a practical, feasible approach that’s going to have the greatest impact on our childcare providers,” she said. “The increased reimbursement will allow them to reinvest into their staff, into their operations.”

Increasing rates will also make it more likely that programs will participate in the program, which is voluntary, said Rockaway, president of the NC Licensed Child Care Association and CEO of Sounds and Colors.

“If subsidy doesn’t go up, then childcare centers are either forced to close if they’re heavily subsidized … or child care centers that are on a mix of subsidy and private parents can increase their rates, but then will take fewer subsidy children,” he said.

What about waitlists?

Meanwhile, thousands of families are waiting for subsidies to afford care. , 55,166 children were receiving subsidies and 8,319 children were on waitlists.

Enrollment is slightly up and waitlists are slightly down , when 54,676 children were served and 10,892 children were on waitlists.

Local agencies administering subsidy funds had to start waitlisting families in fall 2024 when federal pandemic relief funding ran out, according to DCDEE in an emailed statement to EdNC:

During the pandemic, states received American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funding. This extra funding helped North Carolina pay for childcare subsidies and keep waitlists lower. This federal funding ended in September 2024. In order to comply with federal requirements, which do not allow the removal of vouchers from children already participating in subsidized programs, North Carolina instead had to slow enrollment into the programs which led to an increase in the waitlists for potentially eligible children.

Overall, the total available funding decreased significantly from June 2024 to September 2024—from $617,789,488 to $557,023,832. This decrease in funding has reduced the number of children served through the subsidized child care program.

In order to tackle those waitlists, it has to make financial sense for facilities to participate in the program, Martin said. NC Child has done research on steps the state could take to eventually reimburse providers at the actual cost of care. This year’s ask is the first of four steps, eventually totaling $380 million per year.

“Investing in the subsidy not only sustains the programs now, but it’s really sustaining our future, and it’s an economic imperative and an economic investment,” Martin said.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has no regrets about universal childcare.

As she approaches the end of her second term in New Mexico’s top office, she acknowledges there are some things she would have done differently. In a recent interview, she called 20/20 hindsight a “very powerful tool” that not enough politicians put to good use.

Moving the state toward a free childcare system — open to all New Mexico families regardless of income — isn’t on that list, however. The issue has turned into one of the defining public policy issues of Lujan Grisham’s tenure — which will come to an end later this year. The state’s heavily Democratic Legislature, initially wary of the program, has since voiced support and created a funding stream to continue the initiative for the next five years.

Still, the future of New Mexico’s free, universal childcare system is uncertain: Democratic candidates seeking the governor’s office have promised to double down on the initiative, while the Republicans question its fairness and financial feasibility — with one going so far as to file a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the rules underpinning the expansion.

Lujan Grisham defended her focus on childcare, asserting the state’s free, universal system will be a “game changer” for healthy child development and economic growth.

“In childcare, I really think we have done it as right as you can,” she said.

‘You have to start there’

Less than 20 years ago, most New Mexico lawmakers would have dismissed the idea of a universal childcare system in the state as more punchline than policy, said House Speaker Javier Martínez.

“People would have laughed at us if we talked about universal childcare back then,” the Albuquerque Democrat said.

In 2011, Martínez was fresh out of law school, working as a community organizer for immigrants rights. He and his colleagues started to notice a pattern: Many of the immigrant families they worked with attended organizing meetings with their young children in tow.

“We started thinking: What is the future of our organizing? And we landed on early childhood,” he said.

Organizers and policymakers started to converge around a plan to secure voter approval of a constitutional amendment to draw on the state’s Land Grant Permanent Fund — then about $11 billion and now nearly $39 billion, according to an April report — to pay for a rapid expansion of early childhood programs. The proposal divided Democrats at the time. Martínez said his frustration over the Legislature failing to send the issue to voters led him to run for office in 2014.

It took years, but that plan worked. In 2019, Lujan Grisham — then newly sworn in as governor — signed into law a bill to create the Early Childhood Education and Care Department, based on a plan proposed by Sen. Michael Padilla, an Albuquerque Democrat and longtime advocate for early childhood education.

The next year, the governor signed the Early Childhood Education and Care Fund into law with an initial investment of $320 million. That trust fund has grown to more than $11 billion, State Investment Council documents show.

The Legislature in 2021 approved a resolution to allow voters to determine whether to pull 1.25% more each year out of the Land Grant Permanent Fund, which long has benefited public schools, to boost both K-12 education and early childhood programs. Voters in 2022 overwhelmingly approved the constitutional amendment, which now sends more than $250 million a year from the growing investment fund to early childhood initiatives.

Eligibility for state childcare assistance with no copays also has expanded — growing to include families living at or below 400% of the federal poverty level by 2022. That eligibility limit for subsidized care — $132,000 for a family of four in 2026 — covered the large majority of families in the state.

“There are very few states anywhere that really even thought about a way to create … a revenue stream so that you can start to make this affordable for parents — because you have to start there,” Lujan Grisham said.

Women leading both of New Mexico’s legislative and executive branches also “contributes mightily” to the state’s policy focus on childcare, she added.

Overwhelmingly, the work of childcare falls on women. Women make up about 95% of the early childhood workforce, with Black and Hispanic women working in childcare at a higher rate than the workforce at large, according to U.S. Department of Labor data from 2024. Research from the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, found 14% of New Mexico childcare workers are immigrants.

Meanwhile, women 55% of the seats in the Legislature, outpacing the national average by more than 20 percentage points, according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics. Women hold 57% of New Mexico’s statewide elected executive positions.

There’s a connection between the women working in New Mexico’s early childhood education system and the women who work for them in state government, Lujan Grisham said.

“Mostly women in childcare, mostly women in pre-K, women majority in the Legislature, women majority in statewide offices — I think there’s a lot of synergy there in the state about putting families first,” she said.

Childcare costs, benefits

As any parent will tell you, childcare doesn’t come cheap.

That’s true even when the state of New Mexico is paying the bill.

This year’s House Bill 2 — the state budget bill for fiscal year 2027 — sets aside more than $1.2 billion for the Early Childhood Education and Care Department. That sum, a little over 10% of the state budget, includes $215 million for childcare assistance.

Lawmakers made sure during this year’s legislative session the free, universal childcare system will be financially stable for the next five years. Senate Bill 241, signed into law in March, will allow the state to draw up to $700 million from the early childhood trust fund over five years, in addition to setting up guardrails to ensure lower-income families are “first in line” for assistance if the state’s economy takes a turn for the worse, Martínez said.

Lujan Grisham acknowledged free, universal childcare is an expensive proposition — “public education is expensive, if it’s universal,” she said — but she sees it as a boost for New Mexico’s economy and a balm to the state’s child welfare challenges.

The governor can recount the objections some New Mexicans have to free childcare: “If people can afford to pay, they should. It should not be universal. … It doesn’t make sense to me. It feels like a giveaway.”

But she argues an adequately resourced, universal system will inspire workers and companies to move to New Mexico, while allowing more parents to join the workforce.

That’s particularly true for essential workers like police officers and nurses, who often paid top-dollar prices for overnight or weekend childcare, Lujan Grisham added.

Meanwhile, quality childcare contributes to reduced family stress, calmer households, and long-term cognitive and academic benefits for kids.

While no-cost childcare for all families represents a major cost to the state, Martínez said the policy will stick around — largely as a result of lawmakers being “really judicious” in planning and setting up the program’s funding mechanisms.

“As long as I’m speaker, this is not one of those programs that are willy-nilly going to get axed by the whims of the political winds,” he said. “It took 16 years to get us here, and we will ensure that we deliver on that promise in perpetuity.”

‘We have to get it right’

New Mexico will elect a new governor in November — and the next person to inhabit the state’s top office might not choose to prioritize early childhood education in the same way Lujan Grisham has.

Both Democrats in the governor’s race — former Congresswoman and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman — in recent interviews voiced their strong support for the state’s free, universal childcare initiative. They have promised, if elected, to keep it going, in addition to bolstering the state’s early childhood workforce through increased pay and expanded training programs.

When her child was young, Haaland said, childcare felt cost-prohibitive; she remembered hiring a babysitter just one time in her entire “life as a single mom.” She said she mopped floors and cleaned bathrooms at an Albuquerque preschool cooperative to get a discount on her child’s tuition.

“Universal childcare would have changed my life,” she said.

She described the state’s push toward a free, universal childcare system as a “worthy investment” that would create economic and educational opportunities for adults while improving academic outcomes for kids. Her affordability policy proposes cutting the red tape involved in revitalizing a disused storefront or building — including by turning it into a childcare center.

“It’s better for our economy. It’s better for our workforce. It’s better for our kids,” Haaland said. “I just think it would be a valuable asset for our state.”

Haaland voiced her support for ensuring childcare workers have avenues for career advancement and better pay.

“They deserve to make a sustainable living. … You can’t raise a child on minimum wage in New Mexico, so we absolutely need to do more to make sure that people can make sustainable wages,” she said.

A father of three grown children, Bregman said his family pieced together childcare by counting on family members — particularly his wife — to watch the kids. With the introduction of the free, universal system, he said, “times have changed.”

He argued quality early childhood education has the potential to yield long-term benefits for New Mexico children, who have long suffered from higher-than-average rates of poverty and lower-than-average academic performance.

If elected governor, Bregman promised to build on the promise of free childcare. He said he’d want to conduct a kind of census of the childcare industry to better understand workforce recruitment and retention strategies, quality improvement initiatives, and whether the state’s existing supply of childcare slots meets demand — including in rural and tribal communities.

“We have to get it right,” Bregman said. “We’re obviously spending a lot of money on it, but more importantly, we’re talking about the most important asset we have — our children.”

GOP might ‘peel back’ scope

Republicans running for governor, however, aren’t sold on the program.

Former Rio Rancho Mayor Gregg Hull and Albuquerque businessman Doug Turner voiced similar concerns about free childcare for all. Both said they support childcare assistance for needy families, but they expressed concerns about the financial sustainability and fairness of a program in which families that can afford to pay for childcare don’t have to.

“I think the state has a role to play in helping people who need help — and I think it needs to be done in an intelligent way [to] make sure that the programs aren’t abused,” Turner said.

He also noted the current workforce can’t meet the childcare demand. “We have a gap that we can’t really close very quickly,” he said.

If elected, Hull said, “My first step as governor is going to be to immediately evaluate the viability and the long-term sustainability of the program. … If we need to peel back the scope of it in the short term until we figure it out, then we need to peel that back.”

He said he plans to work with staff of the Legislative Finance Committee on an “in-depth dive” into the childcare supply and demand — and how the state plans to make up the difference between the two.

“This is going down a rabbit hole that can get out of control and be far more expensive than I think anybody ever thought it could be,” Hull said.

Duke Rodriguez, another Republican seeking the seat, took his objections a step further: He filed a against Lujan Grisham, with an eye toward invalidating the rules of her universal childcare expansion.

Rodriguez, joined by state Sen. Steve Lanier, R-Aztec, and Sandoval County father Zachary Anaya in filing the lawsuit, argues Lujan Grisham’s executive branch essentially went about the universal childcare expansion in the wrong way by creating the regulations in November, several months before the Legislature voted to approve funding for the program.

Rodriguez also has raised concerns the true costs could come in far higher than the state’s projections — potentially billions of dollars — and New Mexico can’t rely on federal funding.

“It will be 100% borne by tax revenues and appropriated by the Legislature,” he said.

“Whatever program we ultimately adopt … has to be built to last, not built to simply sound good,” Rodriguez said. “It would be terrible to make promises of access when the capacity is missing.”

A state judge in the 2nd Judicial District Court ruled late last month in Rodriguez’s complaint that Lujan Grisham’s administration must pause the program or present an argument for why the initiative should not be permanently halted. A hearing on the matter is scheduled June 11.

Rodriguez called the ruling a victory.

Lujan Grisham, however, slammed Rodriguez in a statement on Facebook, calling him a “third-tier Republican candidate for governor” and describing his complaint as “frivolous” and a “despicable attempt to mislead New Mexico families and generate headlines for a campaign that is going nowhere.”

She wrote, “Universal child care is in effect and it is NOT being shut down, despite what this desperate candidate claims.”

While Rodriguez expressed his support for assisting needy families, he said in an interview Lujan Grisham’s free, universal system “sounds charming, but [is] probably unlawful.”

“I think providing this kind of support for our New Mexico families is a truly valid aspirational goal,” he said, “but an aspirational goal should not be confused with unenforceable rules and regulations that would put providers at risk, that will put families at risk, and, most importantly, will put children at risk.”

This first appeared on .

In 2025, one-third of states had a waitlist or a freeze on applications for childcare assistance for most families, through the Child Care and Development Block Grant, according to new data published in a from the National Women’s Law Center.��

The number of states with a waitlist or freeze had increased from the prior year — from 13 in 2024 to 17 in 2025. But perhaps more concerning, said Karen Schulman, the center’s senior director of state childcare policy, is the total number of children on those waitlists. 

Between February 2024 and February 2025, the number of children on state childcare waitlists nearly doubled, to 225,000, according to the NWLC, which collected data from state childcare administrators across the 50 states and Washington, D.C. 

Those waitlists only grew as the months wore on. By the second half of 2025, more than 400,000 children were on waitlists in those states, marking a 78% increase from February. In the months since the data was collected, at least five more states, plus Washington, D.C., have implemented waitlists, and two more began freezing intake, according to NWLC. 

“A range of factors are pulling at states,” Schulman said, “so you have more families needing help but a strain on resources that provide that help.” 

Some states are struggling to adjust to the end of pandemic-era funding, the last of which in September 2024, and many states are trying to balance tight budgets while also planning ahead for federal funding cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, she explained. Meanwhile, rising costs have changed many families’ financial circumstances, and more may be seeking out assistance. 

Plus, Schulman said, some states have increased the reimbursement rates paid to providers in an attempt to get more of them to participate in the subsidy program; that has redirected some of the dedicated funds for the program.  

It’s not a surprise that the CCDBG program, which is the main source of federal support for families struggling to afford childcare, is failing to reach everyone who qualifies for it. As of this year, it is to be serving only about one in six of all eligible children, due to inadequate funding. 

While the 400,000 children on waitlists make up a small slice of the total population of eligible children, that number is significant because it represents the families who have expressed a need for the benefit and are being denied it or told it will be delayed, Schulman explained. She also noted that the number of families seeking help is very likely underestimated because of complexities with data tracking. California maintains waitlists at the local level, rather than at the state level; Colorado has waitlists in some counties and frozen intake in others; and Georgia, although it doesn’t use the term “frozen intake,” effectively has a freeze in place since it only serves families meeting priority criteria. 

Whether it’s a waitlist or a freeze, “There are tremendous impacts for a family who is waiting for assistance,” Schulman said. 

While families are waiting for a childcare subsidy, they may have to stretch their budgets to pay for care out of pocket. That could mean putting off other bills, such as rent and utilities, or struggling to afford food. 

“They’re just meeting their basic needs if they have to pay for childcare themselves,” Schulman said. “They might have to patch together unstable arrangements that could fall apart at the last minute and put their job in jeopardy. They may not be able to go to work at all, which could put them in even greater financial straits.”

All of these outcomes, she said, could have impacts on the family’s future financial, emotional and physical health. 

Meanwhile, early care and education programs in low-income areas, where many families rely on subsidies to afford childcare, may face another set of repercussions. They could end up cutting already-low staff wages, Schulman said, or go out of business, putting their enrolled families in a bind. 

“There’s just a ripple effect throughout the whole community, affecting the economy of the community, the workforce of the community, whole neighborhoods,” Schulman said. 

Kim Kofron, executive director of early childhood education at Children at Risk, a Texas-based statewide advocacy organization, said that one of the challenges is that families who join a waitlist may incorrectly believe that they’ll soon circulate off it. 

Anecdotally, Kofron said, she hears that waitlists in Texas are about two years long. (The state had more than 110,000 children on its waitlist as of February 2025, according to the NWLC.)

“Do they patch together some type of childcare with neighbors and friends? Do they go to a subpar childcare program because that’s what they can afford? Or do they turn down the job because … it’s cheaper to not work and not pay for childcare?” Kofron said, outlining the options for waitlisted families. 

She added: “There’s a lot of questions right now from providers of, ‘Is it worth it? Is it worth taking subsidies when I can’t get more kids off the waitlist?’”

These outcomes are not theoretical for RB Fast, founder of Westwood Academy, an early care and education program in Denver. 

She remembers receiving an email in fall 2024 notifying her that one of the counties she serves was . (In Colorado, waiting lists and freezes are decided at the county level.)

“I really thought it would be a couple of months,” she said. “I was not ready for it to be semi-permanent and extended the way it has been.”

Soon, she learned that two more counties would also be implementing a freeze. 

Back then, Fast’s program, which is licensed for 30 slots, was fully enrolled. She estimates that about two-thirds of those families paid with subsidies. Today, her program is underenrolled, with 22 children, and only three of those families pay with subsidies — two got in before the freeze began and the third is a child living with a foster family who was granted a temporary subsidy. 

For the remaining families, some manage OK, but others scramble each month, sending panicked emails asking if they can pay late or use a friend’s credit card for this month’s tuition. “You can tell they’re juggling to try to get tuition paid,” Fast said.

She has also seen firsthand the way some families pull together substandard childcare arrangements in the absence of public assistance. Fast knows of a family that had to start leaving their toddler with the great-grandmother while the parents go to work. 

“I’m sure she loves that child very much … but at 80, are you in place to give an optimal environment to a 2-year-old?” said Fast, noting the level of attention and activity a toddler requires. “It’s not about an inconvenience for one family or a handful of families,” she said of the waitlists. “It affects employers, extended families [and] children.”

Fast is in the process of opening her second location, in a nearby suburb of Denver. That program will not be accepting childcare subsidies, she said. Nor will any future program she opens. 

“It doesn’t feel worth it to me,” she said. 

Despite having room to serve more children, Middletown day care owner Peggy Fuentes often has to turn away families in desperate need of care. Each of her toddler classrooms has 10 students — the state caps class sizes for that age group at 12 — but to fill the remaining seats, she’d have to hire another employee. That’s because a decades-old state regulation says day care classrooms have to have one adult for every five children between 18 and 36 months old.

With operating costs climbing across the board, , Fuentes said it simply isn’t feasible to pay another salary to accommodate just two more children.

“I have an inventory of childcare spots that I’m reluctant to use because it is cost prohibitive,” said Fuentes, owner of On My Way Early Learning and Childcare Center, which serves around 240 children under 13.

New York state has some of the strictest staffing requirements in the country — stricter, in fact, than New York City’s. As state leaders allocate billions of dollars to address the childcare shortage in this year’s budget, a new state law could ease those requirements and unlock new day care seats at no additional cost to providers — but only if the state agency that oversees childcare decides to act on it.  

In December, Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation eliminating a provision that has prohibited the state Office of Children and Family Services from relaxing childcare staffing ratios. The new law leaves it to the agency to actually change the ratios; if it did so, the same number of workers could care for more children.  

State Senator James Skoufis, who introduced the bill in 2024, told New York Focus that adjusting the ratios is “more critical than ever” amid the state’s ongoing efforts to scale up its childcare sector and provide more affordable care to working parents.

Childcare advocates who oppose the change are concerned having the same number of staff supervising more children would increase the risk of accidents and injuries and fail to address a root cause of the state’s childcare crisis: low wages for workers.

Supporters counter that looser ratios are consistent with set by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a professional membership organization that promotes high-quality early childhood education, and that alignment with the group’s guidance would offer flexibility to providers who already operate with razor-thin profit margins.

So far, OCFS has not indicated whether it plans to update the regulations. In a statement provided to New York Focus, OCFS spokesperson Daniel Marans said the agency is “currently assessing the viability of the requested ratio change, with the goal of supporting childcare providers without compromising our commitment to child safety.” The law does not impose a deadline for OCFS to make the switch.

More than 60 percent of New York’s census tracts are classified as a “childcare desert,” meaning that there are three or more children under 5 waiting for every available slot, according to the . Meanwhile, more than 16,000 children are specifically as a result of staffing shortages that have led programs to operate under capacity. While that’s not necessarily related to staffing ratios, some think easing them could help address the shortage.

“We can provide more resources to counties and to providers all we want, but if we don’t provide the very common sense flexibility that these providers require in order to effectuate creating more seats, then the money is only going to go so far,” said Skoufis.

Skoufis introduced the bill after providers, including Fuentes, expressed their frustrations to lawmakers over being held to tougher ratios than their counterparts in New York City, where staffing requirements are set by the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Day care providers in the five boroughs must have one staff member for every five children between 12 and 18 months and one for every six children who are 2 years old. In the rest of the state, it’s 1–4 and 1–5, respectively. The discrepancies are even wider for older children.

Assemblymember Andrew Hevesi, who sponsored the bill, believes aligning ratios with New York City could help thousands of those families access a seat without burdening providers or taxpayers with additional costs.

“Childcare providers are operating on such slim margins that they frequently worry about going out of business,” Hevesi said. “We were looking for a way to give them some breathing room in an incredibly difficult climate without costing anybody any money.”

Dede Hill, vice president of policy at the Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy, a social policy and advocacy organization, has a different perspective. “One thing that makes childcare in New York state so high quality is because we have low ratios — and that’s certainly not something we want to step away from,” she said. Hill is a member of the Empire State Campaign for Child Care, which advocates for universal childcare.

“I don’t think staffing ratios are the solution to the tremendous issues we have related to supply,” said Hill. The key is more investment in the workforce, including higher pay for childcare workers, she said.

One reason providers are facing significant financial strain is that the state’s reimbursement level for its , which covers nearly all of the cost of childcare for low- and middle-income families, isn’t enough to provide high quality care, Hill said. With providers forced to absorb the shortfall, many are unable to offer adequate wages: In 2025, the annual average salary for childcare workers in New York , lower than 96 percent of other jobs.

Fuentes, who has owned her day care center in Orange County for 17 years, said she currently has to choose between raising tuition for all children in order to pay another employee and waitlisting families even though there is ample space to serve them. If OCFS chose to align statewide staffing ratios with New York City, she said, she could enroll around 15 more children without hiring additional staff.

“There’s a childcare crisis in New York,” she said. “If we can’t use our full supply of seats, then that crisis is just going to continue.”

For Heidi-Jo Brandt, president of a union representing more than 8,800 providers outside New York City, the flexibility doesn’t seem worth it. Some revisions to standards may be appropriate, such as the current 1–2 ratio for children under 2 in home-based care, she said, but a broader relaxing of staffing ratios could put children at risk. Research shows inadequate supervision is the main cause of injuries in childcare settings, including , , and from bottle warmers.

“While it could have a tremendous impact statewide, our concern is always for the safety of children,” said Brandt.

Some research indicates that high staff-to-child ratios and smaller group sizes are critical for children’s health, safety, and development, but data on the safety outcome of ratios like New York City’s is limited.

In recent years, as the childcare industry has reeled from a pandemic-driven dip in enrollment and rise in operating costs, have proposed loosening their childcare staffing ratios, increasing maximum group sizes, and relaxing other regulations to meet demand. Many states set ratios based on guidance from the National Association for the Education of Young Children; New York City’s ratios are roughly in line with the group’s recommendations.

Meanwhile, New York state has some of the most stringent ratios nationwide. It is that uses the restrictive ratios recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Public Health Association for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds. Even New York City’s staffing ratios remain stricter than those in many other states.

Skoufis first introduced the bill after then-OCFS Commissioner Suzanne Miles-Gustave informed him that aligning statewide ratios with New York City would require legislation. At the time, he said, OCFS officials “made it crystal clear” they wanted to pursue the changes, though he’s less clear on their position today.

In a January letter to current OCFS Commissioner DaMia Harris-Madden, Skoufis argued that it is “financially unreasonable” to require a 1–5 staff-to-child ratio for 18- to 36-month-olds with a maximum group size of 12.

Hevesi said that he believes the agency should “act sooner rather than later” given the potential benefits.

“My instinct is that there’s going to be support to look at this and see what’s appropriate — but my role was just to take the handcuffs off and now they are free to do whatever they feel is appropriate,” he said.

Buffalo day care owner Emily Thrasher pointed out that New York City and state regulations differ on other aspects of childcare: The city also has more lenient classroom space requirements than the rest of the state, as well as different age group definitions that determine other regulations. For example, New York City defines a toddler as a child between 12 and 24 months old, while New York state’s definition is 18 to 36 months.

Thrasher said full alignment with New York City’s standards would allow her small business to generate hundreds of thousands of additional dollars annually. That, in turn, would enable her to serve more families.

“I can’t even imagine how much that would compound for larger day care centers,” she said. “We could help more families, open more slots, pay our staff more. … The changes seem small, but it would make the biggest difference.”

This story originally appeared in , a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. .

Effective July 13, the Administration for Children and Families will several Biden-era that sought to create more predictable, reliable payments to childcare providers. These include paying providers based on a child’s enrollment, rather than their attendance, which protects them against financial losses from unplanned events such as illness and family travel, as well as making subsidy payments in advance, rather than reimbursing providers the following month.

Both practices help to stabilize the industry by giving programs consistent revenue that allow them to plan and budget month over month, providers and experts said. 

Although the requirements will be rescinded, states will still have the option to pay based on enrollment and in advance of services — just as families who pay privately for child care have long done. There is nothing in the new rules to prevent states from continuing or starting those payment practices, noted Helene Stebbins, executive director of the Alliance for Early Success, a nonprofit that supports early childhood advocates across the 50 states. 

“It doesn’t require it, but it doesn’t prevent it from happening,” she said. “You can 100% still do it.”

But without the requirement, it’s likely that some states will reverse course. Already, three states — , Ohio and — have paused efforts to implement or extend enrollment-based pay, noted Daniel Hains, chief policy and professional advancement officer at the National Association for the Education of Young Children. 

“It’s one of those things that, absent that requirement, and given the fiscal situation states are in, states are not going to prioritize these changes if they’re not required to,” said Hains, “and that’s going to have a negative impact on providers and, ultimately, families.”

Currently, about now pay providers based on enrollment, according to an analysis from the First Five Years Fund that was published in March, while the other half still pay based on attendance. At least 10 states are paying providers up front for childcare subsidies, rather than in arrears, according to policy tracking from NAEYC. 

The particulars of how and when a provider gets paid can seem like a technicality, but to an early care and education program operator, that may be the difference between financial solvency and ruin. 

The administration first announced these proposed rule changes in early January, before opening up the issue to public comments. NAEYC included more than a dozen provider voices in its to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees ACF.

A program director in Louisiana explained why the Biden-era policies help to keep her in business.

“During cold and flu season, if childcare providers were only paid based on attendance rather than enrollment, many of us simply would not survive the winter,” the director wrote. “Most of our families have multiple children, and when one child gets sick, it often spreads through the entire household. Enrollment-based pay is the only model that reflects the real cost of maintaining stable staffing, ratios, and operations.”

A program director in Kansas wrote, “Childcare is a tough job. Providers don’t need any additional obstacles. … Having to wait for reimbursement for a month or more can have a significant impact on a provider’s financial well-being in their program.”

And a director in Maine pointed out that a child whose spot is funded by subsidies should not be treated any differently than one from a family who is paying private tuition. “We cannot predict attendance,” she wrote. 

The Maine director’s point is one that motivated the Biden administration’s 2024 rules, Hains said. The in 1990 establishing the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which authorizes the CCDF, sought to have states’ subsidy payment practices “reflect generally accepted payment practices of childcare providers” who receive payments privately from families, to maximize choices among low-income families seeking care, Hains explained. The Biden rules to get states back in compliance with that original intent. 

Stebbins, of the Alliance for Early Success, said she couldn’t think of a single other industry that operates in the way that early care and education does. 

“It’s Business 101,” she said. “I paid for two kids in childcare. I always paid in advance. I paid if they were sick or we went on vacation. Why is this such a big leap?”

Now that this issue is being returned to the states, she said, it’s on policy advocates and the early childhood community to help make the case to state leaders why enrollment-based pay and prospective pay are so essential. 

“It’s good for the field … because it creates a stable, predictable source of income, and it is aligned with how private pay works in the industry,” Stebbins explained, laying out the argument. “It treats kids who are on subsidy — low-income children — just like everybody else.” 

Those outcomes, she added, have ripple effects across communities and entire states. 

“A stable industry is good for the kids and the programs. There’s less turnover and uncertainty about income,” she said. “It’s good for the state economy because it allows parents to work.”

On the other hand, attendance-based payments may disincentivize programs from accepting families who pay with subsidies altogether, said Casey Peeks, senior director for early childhood policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. 

The enrollment-based pay and prospective pay are only two of the “four critical levers to improving the sector” that the Trump administration is rolling back, Peeks said. The third is the use of grants and contracts to provide direct childcare services, which allow states to enter into agreements with providers to reserve slots for certain populations of children. The reversal of that practice may mean that some families, particularly those with infants and children with disabilities, could have more trouble finding slots for their child. And the final lever is capping the maximum amount a family can pay out-of-pocket for childcare, which the Biden-era rule set to 7% of household income, based on federal affordability standards. 

The co-pay limit isn’t perfect, Peeks acknowledged, but “it gives this peace of mind to know how much you’re going to pay,” she said. 

In Ohio, one of the that has not yet capped co-pays at 7%, the limit is 27% of income, which can be crushing for some families. 

“I think knowing how much of a burden this [childcare] expense is — it rivals mortgage payments and rent payments — to take away a lever that exists for affordability and offer no alternatives puts families who are already struggling in a really difficult spot,” Peeks said.

Nancy Burnside has devoted three decades to caring for children. At age 46, she jokes that she tried to leave the industry several times to pursue careers in retail and event planning, but she always came back to early childhood education.��

In 2015, Burnside returned to her home state from Georgia and reopened her parents’ Kosciusko childcare center, now called 3 Steps Daycare. She knew running the family business would be more of a passion than a lucrative job, but she never imagined things would be so hard. 

“My mom worked 16-hour days,” Burnside said. “I grew up in this industry … But this is the worst I’ve seen it.”

Over the last year, 75 of the 200 children attending her daycare dropped out. Those kids were all on the state’s voucher program, which helps low-income families access childcare that makes working possible. Burnside is losing $28,000 a month, hasn’t taken a salary in two years and is providing free care for five children whose families cannot pay, as well as discounted care for an additional seven children. 

Burnside’s center is suffering like 89% of centers recently from the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative. One year after the state ran out of pandemic-era funds that propped up a fragile system, hundreds of childcare providers across Mississippi struggle to stay open while thousands of parents remain on a waiting list for vouchers. Last year saw the greatest number of closures in nearly a decade, as .  

Out of 229 centers surveyed in the report, more than half reported having to terminate staff as a result of the pause, and nearly half reported caring for children whose parents weren’t paying. 

“When you walk through, everybody says, ‘Your building is full.’ I know it’s full – that’s because I’m not charging,” Burnside said. 

Despite and advocates, the Mississippi Legislature failed to allocate any money toward the state’s childcare voucher program. 

If the state doesn’t put up money for the program, centers will continue to close.

Burnside can’t fathom why Mississippi doesn’t prioritize early childhood education, especially in a crisis of this magnitude. She said there is a misconception that her work is babysitting. She said she has only ever thought of her center as a learning institution. It’s where children master life skills as simple as tying their shoes and as fundamental as making their first friends. 

“This is where they start,” Burnside said. “I don’t know anything else more important.”

Darren Brewer, a single father born and raised in Kosciusko, knows firsthand the importance of quality childcare. Brewer pays out of pocket for the care his 2-year-old daughter receives at Burnside’s center, but he believes he may qualify for vouchers now that his family is down to one income. He hopes to apply once the waiting list is resolved. Brewer applauds the center’s staff for recognizing early symptoms of ADHD and autism in his son, now 5, and for referring him to further testing. 

“It helped us with the doctors to know what to do and all that,” Brewer said. 

Brewer recognizes the importance of that early intervention, along with the countless birthday parties, graduations and everyday acts of love that have taken place at the center. 

“Ms. Nancy helps more people out than anybody in this town,” Brewer said. 

A potential solution that could be ‘huge’

Mississippi’s parents and childcare providers have one last hope for restoring money to the voucher program – a funding model that advocates proposed last year. That model would put unused money from the federal program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families toward the childcare voucher program. 

The Mississippi Department of Human Services is the agency overseeing the voucher program. For months, officials there said it was not possible to use more TANF money than the state already devoted to childcare. Currently, Mississippi transfers the maximum 30% of TANF funds to the state-run voucher program. 

However, advocates have pointed to other states that have legitimately and successfully transferred additional money by creating a revenue stream that utilizes TANF funds separate from the 30% limit. 

In January, department officials and said they were “exploring” the funding model. 

Now, Mark Jones, chief communications officer at MDHS, says the agency is finalizing a plan to use advocates’ model. The department has not made an official announcement. Jones would not say how much money his department would allocate or how many families the additional money would serve. 

Jones estimates that $60 million is needed to resolve the waiting list. Before the Legislature decided against it, lawmakers to the voucher program. Advocates say that while any amount will help, families and educators will continue to suffer if the state doesn’t put up the full amount. 

“As long as we have that waiting list, we know that children, working parents and providers are going to continue to struggle,” said Matt Williams, director of research at the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative. 

Still, Williams believes any allocation of money through this new TANF model would help establish the framework for the state to access more funds for the voucher program in the future. He said the implementation of this funding model would be a “huge, positive development.”

At the height of the crisis, the department reported a waiting list of 20,000 families. On April 22, Jones amended that number, saying it included duplicates and that there are currently 9,400 families waiting for vouchers. 

Even when the system is not in crisis, it is a far cry from reaching all the people for whom it was designed. Many families don’t know they qualify, or they may fall off the program due to red tape. 

Experts in Mississippi do not have solid estimates about how many eligible families go without care. But across the country, the voucher program eligible families, leaving far more without needed help in covering childcare costs. 

Meanwhile, Burnside doesn’t think she can make it past January if the families she works with don’t regain lost vouchers. She knows that closing would be an enormous loss for her community, where her center has been a lifeline for generations.  

Today, she serves many of the children of Kosciusko natives who attended the center when her parents owned it. She’s watched parents dropping off their kids become grandparents dropping off their grandkids. 

“I’m like, ‘I bet you didn’t think you would never come back on this road,’” Burnside laughed. “But they do.”

If her business is forced to shut down, she does not know where those caregivers will go to continue working and supporting their families.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

But now, in the wake of a new focus among Ohio lawmakers on supposed fraud in the state’s childcare system, they are on the verge of ditching the idea altogether. A under consideration would require providers to be paid based on attendance rather than enrollment as they are by parents who pay out of pocket.

In December, conservative YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a video claiming to uncover widespread fraud in Minnesota’s childcare program, particularly among daycare centers run by Somali American residents. The video went viral and reached federal officials, and the Trump administration cited it as motivation to pursue an and various efforts to restrict federal childcare funding. Despite the video offering no verified evidence of fraud — and the fact that the state was several cases of fraud in its childcare system — some states have responded by intensifying their focus on supposed fraud. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott agencies to launch investigations into childcare fraud, while Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare heightened reviews of funding. (The reviews found of providers guilty of any wrongdoing.)

Shirley’s video sparked an immediate reaction in Ohio, according to Tamara Lunan, a childcare organizer with the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. The state has the Somali American population, just behind Minnesota. in Columbus, Ohio claimed centers were receiving public funding for nonexistent children even though evidence at least two of those claims. According to the at The Ohio State University, just 0.43% of all the providers who accept vouchers through the state’s publicly funded childcare program were found to be misusing funds in 2025. In a of 124 complaints sent to the state’s Department of Children and Youth last year, the agency found no evidence of fraud in 100 of them.

In January, Ohio lawmakers two proposals — House Bills 647 and 649 — they said were aimed at combatting fraud in the state’s publicly funded childcare system.  

Marquita McClendon, who has operated a childcare program in Cincinnati since 2023, acknowledged that fraud exists. “But I feel like the systems that we already have in place already do the job necessary,” she said. “We’re changing laws over an unsubstantiated claim. It’s just beyond me.”

The state made some changes ahead of implementing the new enrollment-based payment system that have led to sacrifices for providers. It a requirement for counties to use presumptive eligibility, which allows families to receive childcare vouchers if they already qualify for another program like food stamps, and allows parents to enroll immediately once they get a new job, rather than waiting weeks for their paperwork to be approved. Some providers accept children into their programs during that interim period anyway, Lunan said, but often aren’t paid for all of that time. The state also reimbursement rates for some types of in-home providers and increased the threshold for children to qualify as full time, which allows providers to be reimbursed at a higher rate. 

“There were things taken away from us,” McClendon pointed out. With those reductions, she’s making $10,000 less each month, she said. “We’re in the red.” The loss of revenue has meant she can’t buy new equipment for the children in her care or do field trips this summer as she normally would. “I can’t run an effective program,” she said.

If providers were paid based on enrollment, it would help them weather children’s absences for illness or snowstorms, “things that providers can’t possibly be able to plan for when they’re making their budgets,” Lunan said. It “would help to stabilize the programs.” Instead, “Providers are hemorrhaging income based on these changes,” she said. “It’s killing their bottom line.”

Reversing the decision to pay based on enrollment is just one of the changes included in the legislative proposals Ohio lawmakers have put forward in the name of fighting fraud this year. Some others have since been toned down or removed. initially that would have given the state’s Department of Children and Youth the power to cut off funding or suspend a license for any provider merely suspected of fraud, waste or misuse of dollars without a hearing. That language has since from the bill; now those actions can be taken if “evidence demonstrates” that a provider knowingly engaged in fraud or misuse of funds. But providers remain concerned about lawmakers giving the attorney general more power to prosecute perceived fraud, which in the bill. 

“We don’t want to see childcare providers get penalized because the state made an overpayment to them,” Lunan said. Both overpayments and underpayments are included when states calculate their payment error rates, and those can be due to the state government’s error, not providers acting with ill intent. Her organization is pushing for the state to create a committee made up of childcare providers that could distinguish between clerical errors and actual, intentional fraud. 

The original proposal for , introduced by Republican lawmaker Josh Williams, would have mandated the installation of cameras in all childcare programs that receive government funding to “allow visual inspections in real time,” . It would have given the Department of Children and Youth the ability to view the footage at any time. McClendon pointed out that she has diaper changing stations in her classrooms. “There’s no way to protect my children’s privacy,” she said, calling the idea “a bit extreme.”

While that idea has since been abandoned, lawmakers have adjusted the bill to facial recognition for children who attend programs that receive public funding. Such technology won’t work on young children, particularly infants, given how rapidly their faces are developing and changing, McClendon and Lunan pointed out. McClendon also noted the challenge of keeping kids still long enough to take a photograph. Lunan pointed out that there is already an existing mandate for programs to have an attendance system in place that takes pictures of parents when they sign children in.

An made to that bill the storing of photos of the children. But many parents are still opposed, Lunan said: a against mandating facial recognition has been signed by nearly 900 people. 

Lawmakers are also reducing the time given for allowing a child to be checked in retroactively, if their attendance was originally missed, from 30 days to seven. “That would be a tremendous hardship,” Lunan said, on both providers and the parents who are the ones who have to go into the system and fix the problem.  

The legislation calls for spending up to over two years on data analytics to detect patterns of fraud or abuse. The facial recognition proposal alone would be “expensive for the state and providers, diverting scarce public dollars and provider time away from care itself and toward unnecessary surveillance infrastructure,” said Ali Smith, senior project coordinator at Policy Matters Ohio, . Lunan agreed. “We don’t need funds to come out of childcare,” she said. What Ohio childcare providers need instead, she said, is more funding, not less. “Providers are not defrauding the system. They are barely breaking even — most providers are in the red,” she said. “The conversation really needs to shift from fraud to funding.”

The anti-fraud bills “would just destabilize childcare, or destabilize it further, because it’s already unstable,” Lunan said. 

New Mexico has recently launched the United States’ first model, followed by Vermont and that are working to build capacity to support similar systems.

A national spotlight has also been cast on New York City’s efforts after promises on the campaign trail from Mayor Zohran Mamdani to expand free care for children as by the end of his term in late 2029.

The conversation is growing at several different levels, with some states focusing on pre-K access and others looking into providing care even earlier. But, most are grappling with major roadblocks in scaling larger – and universal – initiatives, including questions on funding models and accountability.

Shael Polakow-Suransky, a former chief academic officer at the New York City Department of Education, and the current president of Bank Street College of Education, spoke with 91ɬ�� about childcare trends and what it’ll look like to create higher quality programs as states look to expand access.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

To kick off our conversation with the idea that there is a lot of movement around early childcare right now and accessibility to it, what are we seeing across the country and what are states investing in or considering legislation around?

We’re not getting any help right now from the federal government. During the Biden administration, it was the opposite. There were federal funds flowing to states specifically to do this work, and that’s part of how you got some really interesting, innovative stuff happening in states not that long ago.

Vermont is one of, I think, only two states now that have a really strong program to for early educators. Kentucky guaranteed for childcare workers that their own children or deeply subsidized care. 

New Mexico is one of the most interesting examples right now because in November 2025, they launched universal childcare. 

One of the things that is striking about their strategy is that they created a dedicated permanent revenue stream for it, … so it’s not conditioned on the federal government being able to support it, or an annual tax appropriation. That makes it stable in a way that’s unusual. They have also specifically said that competitive educator compensation is a goal which is really different.

D.C. is the other place that has done something similar to this. In 2018, they created a that had an explicit call around pay parity [for early care workers], and it gave people initial one time payments [up to $14,000]. Then, they created a salary scale based on educational attainment. They were also trying to push people to get the training that they needed to deliver at a high quality, and during the phase of that project, the employment in the sector grew by 7% and retention rose to over two thirds.

In most places, including New York City, early childhood folks’ turnover is five times the rate of what you see in K-12 settings. That turnover is a function of the low wages and and sometimes the lack of training as well, because if you’re not doing well in your job, you don’t want to stay in it.

In New York, a lot of our workforce is actually in poverty. More than half of New York’s early educators are relying on public assistance. We have more than 16,000 children statewide who can’t be served because of vacant positions and this is where we actually have state funding for childcare seats, but we don’t have people to fill those positions. So I think those models of D.C. and New Mexico are really worth looking at other states.

What about missed opportunities that aren’t being considered when lawmakers are drafting legislation or proposing new funding?

When you think about elected officials and who they’re accountable to, the most clear promise you can make is X number of seats for X communities. 

We’re going to have for 2-year-olds in New York City, … that is the thing that will stick in the minds of the public. That other layer, on quality, is harder to boil down into a sound bite.

When you create access, you could create a system that actually does damage if you don’t have quality. Quality is defined by what are the adults able to do with children once they have this time with them? We want it to be something that has real educational impacts, … and taking advantage of this incredible moment of brain development where 90% of your brain architecture is built by the time you turn 5.

What does high quality care look like? What are signs for parents to look for?

A quality learning environment for early childcare allows kids to move around freely and explore and interact with each other and with adults and the materials that are in the space, whether it’s blocks, or art supplies, or a dress up area, or a water or sand table.

In low-quality settings, a lot of times what’s happening is kids are in some way, physically restrained from moving, and this is done in the name of safety. In that low-quality setting, you don’t have enough adults, the physical layout of the space isn’t totally safe for a toddler to be wandering around and the kinds of things that are going to be interesting for that toddler to pick up and stick in their mouth are not available.

In a low-quality environment, that child is maybe sitting in a high chair or in a playpen, and there’s an iPad going that they’re looking at which is not able to interact with them and is not supporting that development. You may be keeping the child physically safe, but if they aren’t able to interact and move, their brain development is not going to progress the way it needs to.

You want to set up the physical space, and you want to have the staffing to support that flexible movement and exploration, because that is how our brains develop – through those types of interactions with people and with materials. If the person is so stressed, either because their own life is so stressful because they’re not able to make ends meet and or their work environment is so stressful because they’re understaffed and working really long hours, that connection is lost.

When we talk about opening seats across the country, what are the odds that these seats are going to be low quality care programs?

There’s been research done over the years that has looked at the quality of early childhood settings and in general, that number of really good settings are like 20 to 30% of what we have. That doesn’t mean that the other 70% are low quality – it’s a spectrum. My guess is probably only 10%, maybe 15%, fall into that low quality bucket, but there’s a lot in between that high quality and low quality that needs work.

How can states and lawmakers take more accountability when they are considering opening more spots up to ensure that it is leaning toward the highest level of care for the youngest kids, especially developmentally?

Building a living wage is the most important thing because that brings people into the workforce. It encourages people to stay in the workforce. And as people stay, they develop experience and relationships with children. You can’t do that without training. So that’s the other big piece of this, what are we doing to train people well?

From birth to 3, there’s not a requirement anywhere in the country that you have to have a teaching license to teach at that level and there can’t be that requirement given the current compensation structure. So then, what is the requirement? If you’re not going to ask people to have a bachelor’s degree or master’s degree, … how do you provide them with training and support that will enable them to accelerate learning and development for children?

The goal is that you build in the resources for professional development for the existing folks who are already in the field, and then resources for people to get trained as they enter the workforce as well. 

I’ll give you one example. Bank Street has partnered with New York City during the pre-K initiative because the state actually does require a master’s degree for pre-K teachers here and that’s a relatively new requirement, so there are a lot of teachers who were working before that requirement went into place, and are now out of compliance with that law.

The city asked us at Bank Street to design something specifically for that group that would be attuned to the fact that they already have lots of knowledge and skills and they don’t need to start from the beginning. 

We created something called the Advanced Standing Program, which is a mastery based program for teachers who are already pretty experienced, and so they can do it much more quickly than a normal master’s degree. They get credit for their experience, so the cost is lower, and it’s historically been paid for partially by the city or by nonprofits where the folks are working. 

So, creating those kinds of programs that are really responsive to the real needs of folks in this workforce, as opposed to a compliance requirement that pushes a lot of people away.

There’s some examples now of universal childcare, but in most states, it is pretty limited to low-income families or at a pre-K level. So, when we’re talking about this quality issue, I want to get into equity also. Childcare programs may be getting some of the highest needs students. How does the issue of quality play a role in development and readiness by the time these students enter the K-12 system? 

The achievement gap that we see in K-12 schools between wealthy and low-income students – which is usually like a 20 or 30 point spread in achievement when you look at third grade or eighth grade test scores or high school graduation rates – is visible beginning at 18 months.

If you study toddlers, the same exact graph shows up between upper-income and low-income children. So why is that? 

We know that’s exactly that moment where language development is happening in the brain, and so if a child is sitting in front of a TV all day by themselves, or iPad or and no one’s talking to them, no one’s interacting with them, then they’re going to be really low scoring around that language development.

There’s not much that’s different between upper income and lower income children except for the fact that upper income families have much more access to quality care. If we can provide that quality care across the income spectrum, there’s a shot at closing those achievement gaps later on.

We’ve talked about New York City a little bit, and I know through several decades, there’s been a push and pull around expanding this early childhood care access under each mayor. Can you talk a little bit about the history of what New York City has tried, what’s new now under Mamdani’s proposal and whether that will be effective or not?

One of my big regrets, I was senior deputy chancellor under Mayor [Mike] Bloomberg for his third term in office, and it was around that time that we started to expand pre-K, but it was a very modest expansion. As someone who came up as an educator in middle schools and high schools, I didn’t really know what I know now about the power of early childhood. I don’t think any of us at the DOE in those days, other than folks working in the early childhood division who weren’t at the decision making table, understood how powerful the impact on educational equity is if you invest in early childhood. 

It took Mayor [Bill] de Blasio making the pre-K commitment as part of his first mayoral campaign to make that the focus for the Department of Education and for the city as a whole. They added 60,000 new seats in pre-K, then expanded pre-K as well in the second term. 

Mayor [Eric] Adams made lots of promises about working on this but really didn’t move the ball. 

What Mayor [Mamdani] campaigned on is that there’ll be free childcare for kids from birth to 5. It’s beginning with expanding the number of seats for 3-year-olds and expanding 2-year-olds. It’s a fairly modest expansion in this first year, and I think the question that will face the mayor over the rest of this term is how do you get to that larger goal where everyone has access and and how do you do it in a way that pairs access with quality? 

I think they’re off to a good start.

I want to pose the question you said Mamdani’s team will have to answer. How do states lead large scale expansion and ensure quality as they try to expand to everyone?

One of the lessons that we learned from the pre-K expansion is that you need to pay attention to the existing ecosystem and not lose capacity as you build capacity. 

One of the downsides of the pre-K expansion during de Blasio’s term was that they put a lot of the seats into public elementary schools, and the teachers became part of the UFT. They got regular salary the same way any K-12 teacher, which is great, but then the nonprofits that were running childcare programs as part of the initiative didn’t have the funding to match those salaries, and so a lot of people left the nonprofit daycare centers … and even worse, family childcare, which are small businesses run out of people’s homes that usually serve children birth to 5, were not initially included in the strategy.

We actually saw a loss of childcare seats in the birth to 3 space when some of those folks went out of business. 

I think part of the solution this time around, particularly because we’re working with younger children, is how do you support family childcare as part of this? How do you help improve the quality and the economic viability of that? 

Last question just to wrap us up. What you had talked about during your time at the NYC Department of Education with not paying attention to childcare, I think is something that was universal for lawmakers early on too. This conversation has really picked up in the last five years or so. How likely is it to continue seeing such acceleration in this movement?

I think one of the interesting things about childcare is it’s a bipartisan issue in most places in the country. 

The governor of Ohio, a Republican governor, has done massive investments in early childhood. Nebraska, Louisiana, lots of red states have really prioritized this, and the reason why is that more than three quarters of families have both parents in the workforce, so people need childcare. They need a place for their children to be. They need to be able to afford it, and they want it to be safe, and they want their children to be learning.��

From an educational equity standpoint, we need that quality in order to sort of solve our broader problems in terms of achievement gaps in our school system. 

We haven’t seen as much investment in the second Trump administration, but the first Trump administration actually saw the biggest increase in early childhood funding since the Clinton administration. Biden went even further. Those were both a Republican president and a Democratic president actively investing in this. We have Republican governors and Democratic governors actively investing in this.

This is something that really speaks to people, and so I think for that reason, we are going to continue to see new public funding flow to this. It may not come as fast as I would hope, but we’re on the trajectory in the right direction.

That began to change in 2022, when Kentucky became the first state in the country to roll out an initiative making most early childhood educators automatically eligible for childcare subsidies. 

Novel at the time, this program — which, in effect, provides free childcare to early childhood educators in licensed programs through an expansion of the state’s Child Care Assistance Program — caught the attention of leaders in dozens of other states and has been replicated widely in the years since. 

“It’s not just happening in one type of state,” said Diane Girouard, state policy director at the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a nonprofit that advocates for high-quality early learning experiences. “It’s happening in [states] big and small; blue, red and purple; rural and non-rural. States are just seeing that it’s working. It’s unique. It’s a really good workplace benefit.”

The idea to make early educators automatically eligible for childcare assistance was conceived as a strategy to help recruit and retain early childhood educators in the wake of the pandemic. By 2022, many families needed childcare to return to a normal work schedule but often couldn’t find spots for their children because early care and education programs were so severely understaffed, leaving slots unfilled and entire classrooms vacant. 

The model was so successful in Kentucky that other states took notice and began to fund their own versions of an effort to provide childcare assistance to early childhood educators, primarily through pilot programs. More recently, some states have even moved to make the program permanent. 

Last month, both and enacted laws making most early childhood educators automatically eligible for childcare assistance. Iowa’s governor signed a bill on April 9, while Kentucky’s program was made permanent a few days later, on April 14. 

“We’re psyched,” said Sarah Vanover, director of policy and advocacy at Kentucky Youth Advocates and one of the champions of this program in the Bluegrass State. 

“We’re known for being frugal and conservative with money,” Vanover said of Kentucky’s legislature, which is overwhelmingly Republican. “And yet this is something we’re investing in. When you have that dialogue with [program] directors, they’ll tell you they have been able to open classrooms and keep staff.”

The reason states have continued to invest in this type of program, Vanover and other state leaders shared in interviews, is because it works. By delivering free or discounted childcare to early educators — many of whom have jobs with low wages and few, if any, benefits — several states have seen workers who are more willing to stay in their jobs. And some educators who had left the workforce to stay home with their young children are finding it’s just enough of an edge to lure them back into their teaching positions, surveys and program directors have shared.

Since 2022, leaders from 38 other states have reached out to Vanover about the model, she said. Many of those leaders have gone on to pursue some form of the program. At least a dozen states, including , , , and , currently have at least a pilot program in place providing childcare assistance to early childhood educators. Two others, New Jersey and West Virginia, have introduced related bills. is the only state known to have initially offered and then ended this type of program, and in that case, it was the result of a severe budget deficit, Girouard said. 

While the model has spread, no two initiatives are exactly alike, Girouard added.  

Kentucky and Iowa, for example, make this benefit available to early childhood educators regardless of income, while most other states only have enough funding to increase the income threshold above what is available to all families in their states. In Rhode Island, for instance, the state’s childcare subsidy program is available to all families with an income less than 261% of the federal poverty level. For , that income cap increases slightly, to 300%. 

And Kentucky’s program includes any staff member working in a center-based early care and education program — from teachers to administrators, cooks to early intervention specialists. 

“You can’t run a childcare program without the assistant teachers, without the nutrition staff, without the administrators,” Vanover said. “If you’re looking at doing this without the other staff, you’re going to have teachers get shuffled around. It’s essential for the whole program to take advantage of it — every employee.”

Meanwhile, a in Maine — called the “childcare employment award” — has emerged as unique in a couple of ways. 

Maine’s program provides at least a 50% discount on childcare for early childhood educators, according to Heather Marden, co-executive director of the Maine Association for the Education of Young Children, a state affiliate of NAEYC. For staff who were already eligible for childcare subsidies before the pilot, the state also covers the cost of their co-pays, which can run anywhere from $3,000 to $8,000 a year, Marden said.

Importantly, Maine’s program is distinct in that it allows home-based childcare providers — a group often left out of this benefit — to participate. (The legislation that made Kentucky’s program permanent also allows home-based providers to use the benefit for the first time.)

A recent of Maine’s pilot program found that it has had a positive impact on workforce retention, noting that nearly every participant was considering leaving the field before receiving the award.

Moreover, the report found, many of those participants were weighing whether to leave the workforce altogether to stay home with their children, rather than looking for jobs in other fields. The discounted childcare has put enough money back into their pockets that they have been able to stay.

Marden noted that while that’s good for each individual teacher, it’s also good for entire communities. 

“The impact of retaining one educator is pretty incredible,” she said, explaining that a single educator gained or retained opens up licensed classroom slots for four to 12 children. 

Maine’s childcare employment award program was serving 511 children from 313 families as of September 2025, with nearly as many children and educators on the waitlist. The state has funded the pilot at $2.5 million a year for the past two years, and it just hasn’t been enough to reach everyone, Marden explained.

While many early childhood leaders in Maine want to see the pilot program funded at a higher amount, the reality is that it will likely soon cease to exist altogether. During the recent legislative session, which ended in mid-April, policymakers did not fund the pilot for another year. As of now, the program is slated to end after June 30.

In Iowa, uptake has been strong. As of September 2025, more than 3,600 children from 2,153 families had taken advantage of the benefit, according to data from the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services. And a survey conducted by the state agency, the results of which were shared in January 2025, found that 87% of participants remain in their roles, and 12% began working in childcare as a result of the pilot. 

Hollie Allen, co-owner of Vine Street Child Care, a large center-based program in West Des Moines, Iowa, said that at least 13 of her teachers — out of about 60 people on staff — are enrolled in the program. They still owe co-pays between $35 and $100 per week, depending on factors like household income and number of children, she said, but that’s a big improvement over the full cost of a spot in her program.

“I don’t understand why they’re calling it free childcare. It’s not,” Allen said, but added that, compared to the $360 per week she charges for an infant slot, “paying $67 is awesome.”

The program has been a “double boon” for Allen, she said, because she was previously giving staff who weren’t eligible for other financial support a 50% discount on childcare at Vine Street — and losing money on those slots in the process. Now, with the state’s childcare assistance program covering the cost of early childhood educators’ childcare, Allen has been able to give every person on payroll a $2 per hour wage increase. 

“It was a big cashflow injection for our program,” Allen said. “Those across-the-board wage increases were critical.”

In other states, such as Rhode Island, where the pilot program has been extended through 2028, the impact on turnover in the field has been real but modest, said Lisa Hildebrand, executive director of the Rhode Island AEYC. 

“It’s still helpful,” she said. “The intent is there. It’s still retaining some educators. But it could be a lot better.”

Hildebrand added: “We just need way more money in the system. This is not going to solve all the problems. It’s a little bit of Band-Aids. You’re giving free childcare to educators because you’re not paying them enough that they can afford childcare on their own. You’re still not paying people enough, and that’s the problem.”

“With pain in my heart, I told my son I couldn’t pick up or drop off my grandson at school anymore,” said Hernandez, who asked to be identified by her first initial and last name in order to protect her safety. “I was scared. If they take me when he’s with me, what would they do to him?”

She cares for her two grandchildren, ages 5 and 6, while their parents are at work. The 5-year-old, who has been diagnosed with autism, attends a preschool with specialized resources. Outside of preschool, Hernandez is the only one his parents trust to care for the boy.

“I dropped him off, picked him up, went on his school field trips, cooked for him after school,” recalled Hernandez. She took three buses to get to the school, a daily roundtrip commute between two and three hours, while carrying a stroller and diaper bag.

But Hernandez had to pull back. 

The nation’s child care system relies on the contributions of immigrants like Hernandez. early care and education providers identify as immigrants, and home-based child care — the most arrangement in the U.S. — has a of immigrant providers than center-based programs.

Over the past year, immigration enforcement activities have intensified, leaving providers and families anxious and unsettled. Since he took office, Trump has expanded immigration enforcement and a policy that prohibited immigration activity in certain spaces, including schools and places where children congregate. The administration has also made financial investments in federal immigration enforcement.

These investments and policy shifts have disrupted the child care workforce nationwide, heightening fear and instability among providers. caregivers and child care providers of young children have reported noticing the impact of immigration enforcement activities in their community, according to the RAPID Survey Project at the Stanford Center on Early Childhood. Some have left the field altogether. 

A conducted by economists Chris Herbst and Erdal Tekin found that increased arrests by federal immigration officers in the first six months of the Trump administration are associated with 39,000 immigrant child care providers leaving the workforce. It also found that, as a result of the increased arrests and shrinking child care workforce, 77,000 American-born mothers also .

Below are the stories of five immigrant women providing home-based care for relatives and neighbors. Located in California, Colorado, Illinois and Texas, they all reported that intensified immigration enforcement has disrupted their work, with ripple effects on the children and families they serve. 

Some shared that the young children they care for have expressed fear that their parents could be arrested. Some said they had to change their routines to limit their time in public spaces, and that parents were doing the same. Others said parents stopped taking their older kids to school. 

These vignettes — which draw from interviews conducted in Spanish that have been translated and edited for clarity — offer insight into the experiences of immigrants caring for our nation’s youngest children. 

A. Hernandez

Home State: Illinois
Place of birth: Mexico
Number of years providing child care: 6
Still providing child care: Yes
Number of children cared for 2��

After visiting family in the U.S. in 1991 when she was 16 years old, A. Hernandez fell in love with Chicago and decided to stay. She started working at a local restaurant, where she met her husband. She married at 17, had four children and eventually became a stay-at-home mom. 

Her children are now adults, and she provides child care for their kids. It’s not uncommon: working parents rely on a grandmother for child care.

But after President Trump was inaugurated, Hernandez said she put cardboard on her windows so no one could see inside and barely left the house. 

When she could no longer bring her grandson to and from preschool, his parents changed their work schedules as best they could to account for the disruption in child care. They eventually enrolled their son in a busing program, but the process took over a month, she said. On the days they could not adjust their work schedules, they opted for him to stay home with Hernandez. He missed over a month of school, and a number of sessions with his speech therapist.

“It affected him a lot. Before, he was starting to speak and sing. He was more conversational,” Hernandez said. “Now, he struggles. His communication is more sounds and gestures. He missed over a month of his therapies, and it shows.”

Hernandez said she’s been anxious for months. Once her grandson was enrolled in the busing program, she decided she could pick him up at the bus stop. She began returning to her routine, but said she constantly felt “like someone was following her.”

Then, in November 2025, a Chicago child care provider was at an early learning center on the same street where Hernandez’s daughter works. It happened while children were being dropped off.

Hernandez recalled hearing the news. The child care provider “was doing something good, working with children. Now we have to explain this to children, that we’re all at risk,” she said.

Worried for their safety, Hernandez and her husband opened a naturalization case in November with the hope of gaining U.S. citizenship. The legal proceedings are expensive, so to help make ends meet, Hernandez has picked up an overnight shift at a fast food chain. (She is typically paid $75 a week to care for her grandchildren.)

Hernandez has tried her best to shield her grandchildren from the increased presence of immigration officers in their neighborhood. “My eldest grandson saw officers near his school,” she said. When he told her about it, he said he was afraid they were coming to take him. “Their uniforms are green. He said that the ‘green men’ were coming to take children in black vans. I told him, ‘No, they won’t take you.’”

Carmela Enriquez

Home State: Colorado
Place of birth: Mexico
Number of years providing child care: 20
Still providing child care: Yes
Number of children cared for: 4

In 2001, Carmela Enriquez came to the United States from Mexico, joining her family in Colorado. She was 15 years old, and enrolled in a local high school as a ninth grader. In 11th grade, she was warned that she would not have access to federal financial aid because, at the time, she was an undocumented immigrant. 

Knowing that her family wouldn’t be able to help cover the cost of college, she dropped out of high school. “I was sad, because I always liked school,” said Enriquez. 

In 2004, Enriquez got married and the next year, she gave birth to her first son. Soon after, her cousin approached her about caring for his infant, who was around the same age as her son. He liked the idea of his baby being watched by someone in the family while he was at work. Since then, different family members have relied on Enriquez for child care. Today, she cares for four of her nephews, in addition to her two youngest children, who are 2 and 6 years old.

Enriquez said she changed a number of daily routines immediately after Trump came back into office. She typically picked up her four nephews from her sister’s house, but assuming there would be more immigration officers stationed at high-traffic roads, she changed her route. 

“I tried not to drive on busy streets,” she said. “But when it snows in Colorado, I noticed they weren’t removing the snow as fast on the roads I traveled on as on the main streets. I told myself I had to stop my fear of officers, because I was also scared of being in a car accident.” 

A few months later, Enriquez began volunteering for a local group that alerted community members if federal immigration officers were nearby. Her eldest child, now in college, warned his mother not to participate.

“He said, ‘No, don’t go. You shouldn’t go outside. If you need something from the market, I’ll go,’” Enriquez recalled. “It makes me sad that my children, born here, are scared.”

Enriquez said she has witnessed people get arrested by immigration officers, and fear has swept across the community. “Last September, there was a local celebration for child care providers. There was food, flowers. Only three providers, myself included, showed up,” said Enriquez. “There had been immigration officers seen on a nearby street. I couldn’t tell providers to come anyway. I can’t take away their fear.”

“We are essential workers. We care for children whose parents work in agriculture, dairy farms, food transport,” said Enriquez. “I’m crying because I see so many kind providers, and the quality care they give to children. There’s people saying this country is not ours, and that if [immigration] officers mistreat us, we deserve it. But no one deserves to be treated that way.”

E. Hernandez

Home State: Texas
Place of birth: Mexico
Number of years providing child care: 12
Still providing child care: Yes
Number of children cared for: 7

E. Hernandez, A. Hernandez’s sister, moved to Texas from Mexico with her husband in 2013, when he relocated for work. Then five months pregnant, she became friendly with a neighbor, who mentioned she could not find before- and after- school care for her 7-year-old son.

“It started as a favor. [The neighbor] said it would be difficult to leave her son with someone she didn’t know,” said Hernandez, who requested we refer to her by her first initial and last name in order to protect her safety. “I said I’d take care of him. I’d drop him off at school, pick him up, and care for him until she came home.” 

Hernandez cared for her neighbor’s son until the family moved 15 months later.

Over the past 13 years, Hernandez has cared for more than a dozen children through a variety of arrangements — some steady, others occasional. She began by watching the children of her husband’s coworkers and, once her eldest started school, connected with local parents in need of after-school care.

Today, Hernandez looks after her own three children and provides care for others as needed. She regularly supports one family during school breaks and, in health emergencies, steps in for another family, sometimes caring for all five of their children — four of whom she said are immunocompromised.

“It’s a favor,” Hernandez said. “These are children who are ill, so I always say yes — even if it’s two in the morning.”

Such flexible, around-the-clock care is especially common among home-based providers. At some point, children requires care during nontraditional hours.

Last year, Hernandez was advised by a local parent to pursue a child care license so she could provide long-term care to more families. (In Texas, child care providers are from a license if they do not care for more than one unrelated child or sibling group.)

“I was so excited. I’ve always loved children, so I decided to call the local agency,” said Hernandez. When asked over the phone to provide her Social Security Number, Hernandez specified she had anIndividual Taxpayer Identification Number (). “The woman on the phone said that Texas does not give child care licenses to people without a Social Security Number,” Hernandez said.

Though she’s been unable to get licensed, she continues to care for children. “I do it for the good of the community, for the good of our children,” she said.

Blanca Luna

Home State: California
Place of birth: Mexico
Number of years providing child care: 5
Still providing child care: Yes
Number of children cared for: 3

Blanca Luna immigrated to California from Mexico in 2016, when she was 24 years old. She arrived with her then 15-month-old daughter in order to join her husband in the U.S. 

She now has two children, 12 and 9 years old. As a stay-at-home mom, Luna began to meet local parents when her youngest son started kindergarten in 2020. 

“In our town, many parents work in agricultural fields. Agricultural workers continued to work during the pandemic [stay-at-home orders], and they needed child care because many centers closed,” said Luna. “I wanted to help because they couldn’t stop working. I started providing child care, even if it was an hour or two … If it were me who needed help, I would want someone to help me. I did it out of love, community.”

Luna has continued to provide child care to local families, usually when school is closed for holidays. She provides regular child care on weekdays to a 3-year-old girl, and is compensated between $300 and $400 a month. She also occasionally provides before- and after- school care for two other children. One of those families pays her $25 per day. The other doesn’t pay her at all.

Over the past few months, Luna said she has been approached by two local parents who do not have American citizenship about whether she would take care of their children if they were arrested by immigration officers. “I don’t have the heart to say no. But it is a concern for me,” she said. “Taking care of a child needs money, and I don’t have an income. Only my husband does.”

Those fears weigh heavily on the children in her care, Luna said, particularly their mental health. The threat of family separation creates instability, especially when “children see parents being beaten, mistreated and humiliated.”

Luna said there are efforts to support families in her community, but they fall short.

“I’ve seen resources like food banks. That’s good. But people can’t pay rent with food,” she said. “I think people want to go to work safely and build a better future.”

Yanet Martinez

Home State: California
Place of birth: El Salvador
Number of years providing child care: 17
Still providing child care: Yes
Number of children cared for: 6��

Yanet Martinez immigrated to the U.S. 17 years ago, fleeing domestic violence in her home in El Salvador. Her five children stayed behind. 

In 2019, Martinez said she qualified for — a program for victims of criminal activity — that has since changed to a, a program for victims of trafficking.

She found her way to Los Angeles and picked up a series of odd jobs. Today, she works at a local community center as a promotora, a Spanish term similar to a community liaison or resource navigator. She’s also a local child care provider.

Four of her children have immigrated to the U.S. She has nine grandchildren, and cares for six of them. She also occasionally cares for her neighbor’s children. 

, federal immigration officers and state troopers arrived at a local park on horseback and in armored vehicles in the neighborhood where Martinez lives. One of her children witnessed the raid.

“My daughter was on the way to work, but she ran back inside. I had a doctor’s appointment, and I chose not to go. It was chaos. I saw tanks — tanks I haven’t seen since I was a girl during the [Salvadoran Civil] war,” said Martinez. “Another time, one of my sons saw federal agents at a parking lot close to his job. He managed to see them in time and hid, but six of his coworkers didn’t make it to their cars. The agents pushed them to the ground, beat them and took them away.”

Despite fearing for her safety, Martinez continues caring for her grandchildren, bringing them to and from school. On a local bus, in transit to pick up one of them, Martinez said, “I’m still working in the community. I’m still providing care for my grandchildren. I do it with fear, with precaution. But I do it.”

Reporting for this article was supported by New America’s Better Life Lab Story Fellowship.

]]> /zero2eight/why-colleges-school-districts-and-hospitals-are-closing-on-site-child-care/ Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:30:00 +0000 /?post_type=zero2eight&p=1031066 In February, the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) announced it would shutter its on-campus child care center, which has operated for nearly 40 years, at the end of the spring semester.The decision caused a weeks-long on campus, with families, staff and students at what many say was a sudden and unexpected move. 

The child care closure at UNO is reflective of a concerning trend: Across the country, universities, school districts and hospitals are shutting down affiliated child care programs at an alarming rate as the cracks in America’s child care system begin to widen into fissures.

Since the beginning of 2025, a growing number of institutions have closed or put forth plans to close on-site child care programs that serve employees and, in the case of universities, student parents. These include universities such as , , and the , along in Washington, Arizona, and Kentucky. During the same time, public K-12 districts — including in Michigan, in Missouri and in Colorado — have announced similar closures, as have hospital systems in , and .

In almost every case, administrators are pointing to rising costs as a key culprit. Indeed, absent public funding, large institutions cannot run a sustainable child care business, particularly as most institutionally-affiliated programs offer tuition discounts to employees. In the case of Baptist Health, a nonprofit health care organization in Arkansas, the system said it $2 million a year operating two of its child care centers.

While there may have been a time when such losses were manageable, these institutions are being buffeted by other headwinds. Many colleges, universities and school districts are dealing with declining enrollment numbers that have . A key federal funding program that helps colleges and universities subsidize child care for student parents — Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) — has been held flat, which is a functional decrease in the face of inflation and rapidly rising child care costs.

Meanwhile, hospital systems are struggling with Medicaid cuts, rising labor costs, and tariffs increasing the costs of imported medicines and supplies; The American Hospital Association a “perfect storm of financial pressures.” 

The rash of institutional closures should be a stark warning about the future of employer-sponsored child care. That term usually conjures the concept of private companies offering on-site centers or subsidies for child care as a workplace perk. But in practice, these institutions function similarly: They operate on-site child care for their community members, such as staff, students or patients — and in many cases, the programs have been around for decades. In a sense, we might consider institutionally-affiliated child care programs the best-case version of employer-supported care. The institutions are often anchored in public missions, subject to greater accountability and backed by generally reliable funding streams. Yet, even these programs are disappearing.

If institutions designed to serve the public can’t sustain employer-linked child care, it raises a larger question about how realistic it is to . 

It seems clear that, reluctant as the decision may be, child care quickly finds itself on the chopping block when budgets tighten. Often, it is viewed as a nice-to-have for institutions, even while it’s a must-have for families. When programs close and families lose subsidized care, they’re often forced into a wild scramble for a spot among scarce options. With the aforementioned headwinds only projected to worsen, more closures are, unfortunately, likely on the way. 

To be clear, the closures don’t signal that on-site child care is inherently flawed. In fact, the passionate reaction of families and providers show just how valued these programs are. The question is, how should such programs be funded? A model that relies on institutions themselves bearing the cost seems to be breaking down. Similarly, depending on a single funding stream, like CCAMPIS, is clearly risky, as it keeps programs in a constant state of vulnerability — just one unfavorable grant cycle away from collapse.

What’s needed, instead, is a way to wrap institutionally-affiliated child care into a broader publicly-funded system, as is done in nations like and . 

The child care sector may well be entering a phase where Band-Aids like incentivizing employers to offer child care benefits like on-site programs or stipends can no longer hold back the bleeding. If universities and hospital systems — to say nothing of Fortune 500 companies like and — are increasingly unable or unwilling to maintain their child care programs despite evidence of their positive impacts, then a course correction is needed. 

Policymakers are rushing to incentivize employer-sponsored child care at a moment when the American economy is slowing down and financial headwinds are picking up. If there’s any good news, it’s that about five thousand years ago humans invented a way to pool individual resources and redistribute them for collective benefit. In other words, the antidote to institutional child care closures is the same as the antidote to mom and pop child care closures: tax dollars. 

]]> /zero2eight/missouri-child-care-subsidy-cuts-could-hit-foster-kids-low-income-families-hardest/ Sat, 11 Apr 2026 16:30:00 +0000 /?post_type=zero2eight&p=1030961 This article was originally published in

Every child who starts at Lemay Child and Family Center in St. Louis County receives a developmental screening during their first month of attendance.

Based on these screenings, kids can receive speech or occupational therapy at the center, and staff can connect families with community support like help sourcing healthy food.

“The economy right now is just really challenging,” said Denise Wiese, the center’s executive director. “So we feel that those extra supports we give parents and children are really critical.”

More than 60% of the children the center serves qualify for a state subsidy program that helps cover the cost of day care for low-income and foster children.

But if lawmakers approve a proposed $51.5 million cut to that program, Wiese told The Independent, the center could be forced to roll back services or reduce scholarships that make child care more affordable.

The cuts are part of a laid out by Republican state Rep. Dirk Deaton of Seneca, chairman of the House Budget Committee, that would eliminate incentives the state currently pays on top of the basic child care subsidy rate.

Deaton told the committee the enhancements were created before the state started paying market-rate costs for child care.

“When those were put in place, the rates weren’t, in some cases,100% of market rate,” he said. “In a lot of cases, we’re already paying the market rate. So why would we be paying more than the market rate?”

For child care providers, Wiese said, losing these payments will be “devastating.”

“That increase for us over the standard daily rate is critical because we welcome any child, regardless of the family’s income level or the child’s developmental level,” Wiese said. “…If those enhancements get cut, we will have no choice but to reduce some of the services that we provide for these children.”

Casey Hanson, deputy director at Kids Win Missouri, told The Independent the proposed cuts would have an outsized effect on the state’s most vulnerable children.

The funding enables providers to cover losses if foster families need short-term or irregular child care. It also helps train staff to work with kids who have experienced trauma.

“Some people think, ‘Okay, that funding just gets cut, and so they still get paid the market rate. They don’t get this extra bit,’” Hanson said. “But it’s not an extra bit to be able to provide that additional therapy or additional support.”

With the cut to their bottom line, child care providers may have to turn families away.

“What decisions do they have to make?” Hanson asked. “Do they have to lay off staff? Do they have to close?… Do they just quit taking foster families?”

Some facilities already hesitate to take on those families, Hanson said, and the proposed cuts would “de-incentivize that even more.”

The cuts come during a period of instability for the program. At the end of 2023, the state changed software providers to manage the subsidy payments, and technical difficulties led to a backlog of missed payments that .

Some day care providers closed under the pressure, and the stress continues today.

Demand for child care subsidies has , exceeding the amount of money appropriated to the program this fiscal year.

With available funds shrinking, the state’s education department launched a waitlist for the program at the beginning of March. Children under state care, like foster children, are exempted from the waitlist. Those who qualify based on their income, though, will have to wait until funds are available.

“Our system is already at or over capacity,” Hanson said. “We don’t have enough resources to serve the children and families that are qualified with this current [funding] structure.”

Despite mounting pressure, providers are expected to see a long-awaited change in the way subsidies are paid that state officials promise will be initiated by this summer.

Currently, child care providers submit attendance logs and are reimbursed based on the number of days subsidy children are in their care. In May, the department plans to pay subsidies at the beginning of the month based on enrollment, not attendance.

Gov. Mike Kehoe championed the switch in his inaugural State of the State address last year.

“We will not allow late payments, or technology issues to put these small businesses at risk of not being able to provide for families in need of child care,” he said.

The governor is still supportive of paying providers based on enrollment, but Deaton’s proposed budget could prevent this change.

Deaton’s budget plan includes instructions to pay “solely on a child’s actual attendance and shall not be made prospectively, on authorization, enrollment, contracted slots or any other non-attendance-based methodology.”

State Budget Director Dan Haug told the House Budget Committee Monday that the state would hold off on paying by enrollment in May if Deaton’s suggestion is signed into law for next fiscal year, which begins in July.

“I don’t think it would make sense to make a change in May and then go back on July 1,” he said. “That would not be good for the providers, moving them around with how they’re being paid.”

Paying on enrollment gives flexibility to providers, Wiese said. A family may need to miss 10 days in a month, but the center can only get paid for five absences.

“If a family wants to spend their day with their child, that’s the best thing for the child,” she said. “If [the state is] paying us based on authorization, that slot is paid for whether that child is here or not.”

With budget amendments forthcoming, Hanson hopes to see edits to benefit child care providers.

“We know that (lawmakers) care about children and families,” she said. “But sometimes these decisions don’t reflect that these [cuts] are going to be really painful for children and families in our state.”

The Independent’s Rudi Keller contributed to this report.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

]]> /zero2eight/pilot-program-provides-early-childhood-educators-with-rent-free-business-spaces/ Fri, 10 Apr 2026 16:30:00 +0000 /?post_type=zero2eight&p=1030934 This article was originally published in

After struggling for months to sustain her child care business at home, Minerva Caba Toribio thought she would have to close due to rent increases and high costs. But now, she’s able to operate out of a classroom located on Granite Street in Worcester at the Guild of St. Agnes, the largest early education and care agency in Central Massachusetts. Caba Toribio has space for 10 children, with five currently enrolled and three others that will soon be joining.

“We serve Brazilian families, Latin American families, immigrant families,” she said. “They feel comfortable to see that we can speak the same language and we have the same traditions.”

Caba Toribio will be able to use the space rent-free for two years. By saving on rent, utilities, meals, and other expenses, she hopes to restart her home-based child care service once the time is up.

It’s all part of a pilot program called the , formed in partnership by the Guild of St. Agnes – which serves almost 2,000 children across roughly 150 child care establishments — and the Worcester-based Seven Hills Foundation — which provides supportive services to children, adults, and seniors with disabilities and other life challenges. Their new family child care incubator — only the third of its kind in the nation — provides two classroom spaces that were empty due to a lack of staffing to two licensed educators to operate their child care businesses while they prepare to later offer the service in their homes. The program is meant to provide more child care slots in an area where demand is high but supply is low, while also making it easier for family child care entrepreneurs to get their start.

“In addition to expanding care to more children and families by using classrooms that were otherwise empty, we are able to share services such as transportation, healthy meals, and business support to the resident educators as they establish their new businesses,” said Sharon MacDonald, president and CEO of the Guild of St. Agnes.

The program, which can accommodate up to 20 children, was modeled after in Boston, which was the first of its kind in the Commonwealth and provides short-term program space, resources, and training for newly licensed family child care entrepreneurs. The other incubator program in San Francisco in 2019 and has trained and established more than 100 new child care businesses, creating over 800 new child care slots.

“I was thinking about closing my business, so when I heard about the incubator, I thought, ‘That can’t be possible. I will have a space where I can keep working with the same families that I had at my home?’” Caba Toribio said.

The other resident educator, Eva Fajardo Marroquín, is a newly licensed provider who will lead the second classroom with 10 children.

Around 59,000 (70 percent) of infants, around 43,000 (43 percent) of toddlers, and around 10,000 (5 percent) of preschoolers in Massachusetts live in a child care . The state defines this as areas where for every three children there is only one child care slot, though there are regions in central Massachusetts where the ratio is greater than ten children to one slot.

Granite Street is in the heart of one of Worcester’s child care , according to Leslie Baker, program director for the Seven Hills Foundation’s Center for Childcare Careers.

The children’s tuition is covered by state subsidies, meaning the Guild of St. Agnes and the Seven Hills Foundation are not responsible for the educators’ salaries. A $1 million grant from the Health Foundation of Central Massachusetts allows them to pay for the building, the classroom equipment and supplies, and a full-time project coordinator who provides case management, business training, and professional development support for the two educators. (The foundation also provides grant funding to CommonWealth Beacon.) The educators will soon establish savings accounts so the coordinator can document their progress towards their long-term business goals.

Cost isn’t the only barrier that aspiring educators face in trying to open family child care businesses. Many, including Caba Toribio, face landlord resistance and struggle to find homes or apartments that allow family child care to operate. Others struggle with navigating the licensing process with the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care.

Many of the families served by the Guild’s child care programs qualify for (CCFA) vouchers from the state. But that system remains underfunded even after the Legislature approved Gov. Maura Healey’s proposal to change the income eligibility threshold from 50 percent of the state median income to 85 percent last year. That move added 4,000 low and moderate-income families to the program, but more than 30,000 children were on the statewide waitlist for the program at the end of 2025.

“It’s opportunities like this that are making sure we are creating pathways for early educators, because the more classrooms we can fill with great educators, the more slots that will become available for the littlest learners in our community,” said Sen. Robyn Kennedy, a Democrat representing Worcester, at the pilot program’s ribbon-cutting event on Monday.

The Commonwealth’s early child care system continues to suffer from a due to low earnings, a lack of employee benefits, and subsequently high turnover.

Among family child care program owners and employees, just over 40 percent receive paid time off, around 25 percent receive paid sick leave, around five percent receive discounted child care, and less than 8 percent receive dental insurance and retirements benefits, according to a 2025 published by the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. Just 4 percent of employees receive health insurance compared to 15 percent of owners.

“I don’t think we often think of childcare as a business,” said Sen. Michael Moore, a Millbury Democrat who represents Worcester. “You can’t be successful if you can’t operate it, put the business model together, and be able to afford it.”

Caba Toribio said many families prefer home-based family child care over center-based child care because it is often less expensive, more flexible, and tightly knit.

“We have a small group. Some parents prefer that. The children have the opportunity to feel like they are part of a family,” she said. “Here in the center, I keep the same concept. Because it’s a small group, they feel safe.”

Baker and MacDonald want to ensure that the program is sustained after the educators move out in two years.

“As they eventually launch their business, part of the project is to backfill it and continue this on,” MacDonald said. “One of the questions, obviously, is: What does it cost to do that without the grant funding?”

They are confident that eventually, other cities and programs across the state will pursue their own incubator projects.

“We’re trying to develop a model that could be replicable by other family child care systems,” Baker said. “We’d like to be that resource for other systems that are interested in developing this.”

This article is part of CommonWealth Beacon’s ongoing coverage of early childhood education issues and is funded, in part, by the .

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

]]> /zero2eight/when-work-isnt-9-to-5-child-care-cant-be-either/ Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:30:00 +0000 /?post_type=zero2eight&p=1030834 In New York City and New Mexico, policymakers are making history by rolling out ambitious universal child care plans that offer affordable care for families and invest in the providers that drive our economy. As these bold efforts expand access for young children, leaders must consider a fundamental reality of modern work: Child care that ends at 6 p.m. might not work for parents whose shifts start at sunset, stretch overnight or change week to week.

Child care during nontraditional hours — including early mornings, evenings, nights and weekends — is a growing need for American families. Flexible care with variable hours from week to week is also in demand.

In many homes across the country, work happens outside of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The best available data, drawn from the past decade, suggest that in some states live with a parent who works nonstandard hours, and that accommodate those schedules — though these figures rely on data collected before the pandemic. These data also indicate that work outside traditional hours is common in families that have lower incomes. 

Expanding access to equitable child care options requires careful attention to the diverse child care needs of working families. For a parent who starts a shift as a nursing assistant at 7 a.m., works overnight as a hotel receptionist or drives for a ride share service as a second job on the weekend, , as many licensed child care programs follow a more conventional schedule. Challenges also exist for parents who work jobs with rotating shifts, who not only require care outside of normal business hours, but also need the hours to be flexible. 

To ensure that working families can thrive, the child care sector needs more public investment in child care settings that offer care during nontraditional hours and increased support for the workforce needed to deliver it. When designing a universal child care system, policymakers must consider the growing population of parents working outside traditional business hours and should incorporate the following three principles.

Include home-based child care providers in policy design. Right now, most child care during nontraditional hours is , rather than by licensed child care providers. In other words, by people families trust who care for children in ways that resemble parental care. This type of arrangement — known as family, friend and neighbor (FFN) care — is in the U.S. child care system. This trend points to both a preference and a gap: Families rely on familiar, home-based care during these hours, yet the supply of licensed child care that is open during these hours simply isn’t there. Building a universal child care system that is responsive to families’ needs will require recruiting and investing in licensed family child care providers and FFN caregivers who operate outside of child care licensing systems. Building policies that include the full range of home-based providers will require creative solutions, such as community-based peer support groups and access to resources and materials related to caring for children. 

Create fair working conditions and compensation for providers who offer care during nontraditional hours. Increasing child care access for working families must prioritize investment in the workforce caring for children during . These providers face some of the in an already strained sector: low pay, unpredictable schedules, on-call demands for families that need last minute child care or need to change hours without notice, and the strain of balancing their own family responsibilities with offering child care. Many FFN caregivers provide child care for their families . Expanding child care options that meet the needs of families working nontraditional hours requires intentional strategies that ensure a livable wage for paid child care workers and compensation for FFN caregivers — many of whom indicate for their work. These approaches must also reflect that the cost of care varies by time of day. 

Right-size standards and regulations to reflect the realities of providers caring for babies and children during nonstandard hours. Finally, quality and regulatory frameworks must evolve to recognize that care at 10 p.m. does not look like care at 10 a.m. Children’s development during nontraditional hours is shaped by like shared meals, bedtime stories and quiet, unstructured time. Systems that measure quality solely through daytime standards risk missing — such as healthy sleep practices and creating calm and comfortable environments — while placing unnecessary burdens on providers. Universal child care systems should offer tailored professional development that reflects the realities of care at night and on weekends — focused less on building lesson plans and more on developing routines, relationships and supporting children through transitions like bedtime or early wake-ups.

As states and cities build universal child care programs, ensuring access to child care beyond standard work hours must be a central goal. By embracing a mixed-delivery system that values all types of care, investing in compensation and professional development, and developing appropriate standards, early adopters of universal child care initiatives can provide an example of how to create policies that meet the needs of all working families.

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