Abrupt closures are the reality for far too many early care and education programs. In recent months, Guidepost Montessori, a network of more than 130 Montessori-inspired child care programs and schools serving children ages birth to 18, more than 16 sites and to financial struggles and an inability to pay rent; in each of these cases, parents and educators have gotten at most a month’s notice. Some received an email the night before landlords changed the locks.

The short-notice aspect of child care closures is not limited to for-profit chains. Independent, community-based, and nonprofit programs also frequently provide meager notice. In February, Thrive Early Learning Academy, an independent center near San Antonio, Texas with zero warning, with the owner writing that due to staffing challenges, “It is with a heavy heart that we announce the temporary closure of Thrive, effective immediately.” Last year, Rockford Day Nursery, a 100-year-old center in Illinois had a , as did in the small South Carolina town of Aynor.

A sudden child care closure can create immense stress for parents and staff. In 2024, Molly Dickens, a stress physiologist, co-authored an with reproductive psychiatrist Lucy Hutner in which the pair recounted the story of Julia Sachdev, a mother of two young children who got an email that her kids’ preschool was closing in a month. They wrote: “‘It was so stressful,’ reflected Ms. Sachdev. ‘There was this suffocating anxiety that ruled my day. I couldn’t concentrate on other things. It kept me up at night.’” Dickens and Hutner noted the negative effects of chronic stress on parents and children, and also cited research that — a state of insecure and unreliable child care — “has been linked to negative mental health outcomes for mothers for at least six years afterward.” They underscored that “Unpredictability itself is a source of stress. Even when parents manage to secure care for their children, it can be unreliable, and they never know when it might go away.” 

The reasons for rapid child care closures vary. In some cases, as with Guidepost, it may be financial problems or other business failures. In other cases, as with Thrive Learning Academy, a lack of staffing means the program cannot legally operate. And in others, circumstances may be beyond a program’s control, as when a landlord .

While it is instructive to compare the closure of child care programs to the closure of public schools, it’s important to recognize that this is a case where the lack of a public system really rears its head. A public school closure typically involves a months- to years-long process that is and requires a large amount of meetings and discussion. That’s not the case for most child care programs. The government cannot force a private business or even a nonprofit to stay open indefinitely, and the overwhelming majority of child care programs in the U.S. fall . That doesn’t mean, however, that there are no public policy tools.

First, it’s important to note that if a private business that serves a social function is closing, the government often requires reasonable notice. Banks are a good example: The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation legally requires banks to prior to closing a branch. Skilled nursing facilities, too, at least 60 days notice and a plan for relocating residents, as mandated by the Department of Health and Human Services. 

Another challenge is that unlike other industries, there is no rescue mechanism for failing early care and education programs — but there could be. When systemically important companies are risking closure, the government often steps in. For example, when big financial institutions and car companies were flailing during the 2008 fiscal crisis, the federal government provided a . When a public school district’s financial situation is dire enough, it typically , meaning the state takes over governing authority in exchange for filling the funding gap, as has happened in districts such as and . In short, if the social impact of a given service failing is significant enough, the compelling public interest for government intervention is well-established.

While a mom-and-pop child care center or even a medium-sized chain like Guidepost Montessori doesn’t rise to the level of systemic importance as a General Motors, they provide critical support to families and children, and when one of them closes, it . Yet there’s currently no public recourse whatsoever in child care. There is no established mechanism for Colorado or its cities, for instance, to step in and purchase the shuttering Guidepost facilities at a discount, turning their operations over to a trusted nonprofit or community-based organization. This is an area ripe for policy entrepreneurship — surely some type of mechanism such as a trust fund or loan fund could be established that would keep the centers’ doors open, even if the ownership changes hands.

There are other potential policy actions. While the difference between 30, 60 or 90 days isn’t massive when you’re talking about the supply scarcity that marks child care, states requiring a more robust amount of notice to families and staff would at least offer more breathing room to seek alternative arrangements. And if there were more protections in place to ensure that landlords leasing their spaces to child care programs had to give more notice if they planned not to renew — say 6 months — that could offer program leaders a more reasonable runway to find a solution. 

Finally, program failures do not happen out of the blue. There are typically early warning signals along the way. If states established — or improved — the lines of communication with child care programs and offered guidelines or requirements around how to share these warning signals sooner, there would be more time for states to implement supportive strategies to help struggling providers.

For example, regulations could be put in place to require licensed programs to alert the state when a staffing shortage reaches a critical level in which one or two more departures will drop them below the legal minimum, forcing a closure of classrooms or the entire site. For this issue, states might consider having an “emergency pool” of retired directors and educators who could be called on to maintain operations until the situation is resolved. Similarly, large chain programs could be required to share audited financial statements with the state on an annual basis so that the state has a sense of their general financial health and risk of collapse, given the outsize impact of multisite closures. 

There are various levers to pull, but the status quo is untenable and policy change is needed.

Families and child care educators deserve the confidence and peace of mind that the rug is not going to be suddenly pulled out from under them, and young children deserve maximum caregiver stability that promotes their healthy development. We’ve allowed sudden closures to be a fact of life in the U.S. child care system for far too long. That’s a policy choice; it’s time to make a different one.

“I got a question [about] whether or not ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] can look through your purse. I got a question about kids carrying their documents. One parent asked, if she elected a standby guardian and if that guardian took the child home, whether that would keep [her] kid from getting deported.” 

Veronica Thronson, a law professor and the director of the Immigration Law Clinic at Michigan State University Law School is also making herself available to answer legal questions. She’s conducted a number of trainings at the , a local nonprofit supporting refugees in Michigan, and was a panelist on a recent Migration Policy Institute webinar about issues affecting immigrant families and early childhood systems. 

Thronson says Trump’s (regardless of its ) unleashed a flood of phone calls from clinic clients with children. “They were saying they heard from a neighbor that their kid is not a citizen anymore, and so we have spent a lot of time saying, ‘No, no, no, you are safe. Your child is a U.S. citizen’.” 

The clinic Thronson leads is for second- and third-year law students who serve clients in East Lansing and surrounding areas who come from Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela and her own home country of Guatemala.

“We usually have them come to our office to meet with us,” she explains, “but now we’re saying, ‘No, we’re coming to you’ so they don’t risk getting stopped along the way because they may not have a driver’s license or they may not have a very good car that gets stuck in the middle of the road. We minimize the risk of them getting encountered by ICE.” Many of her students are immigrants themselves or are related to immigrants. “They are worried about enforcement against their own families,” she adds. 

To date, there have been some , but no confirmed raids on child care centers. 

Thronson says, “I’m really hoping that ICE has enough on their hands, targeting people who are serving a criminal sentence or people who have prior orders of removal. That gives us a chance to prepare the community.” 

Immigration advocates and legal experts have differing opinions about the severity of the threat, but there are some consistent themes in how they are approaching the moment. 

Supporting Early Educators In Understanding The Rights of Children and Their Families 

Key advocacy organizations, including (CLASP) and the (NILC) are providing — and regularly updating — resources for child care educators. According to Suma Setty, senior policy analyst at CLASP, about one in five U.S. child care providers is an immigrant. “Unless something drastic happens, there are certain things that will remain true, like your Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights,” she says, referring to protection against arbitrary arrest and self-incrimination, respectively. “All people have a constitutional right to remain silent.”

She adds that child care providers and early educators should understand that the only warrants they must honor are those signed by a judge. 

Helping Child Care Programs Make a Plan

Setty suggests that child care programs should put protocols in place to protect staff and families and that that will help them ease the anxiety. “They need to know what to do in a situation that might be scary and intimidating, such as if ICE agents show up at their door,” she notes.

CLASP provides for how early childhood programs can create “safe space” policies to protect young children and their families. These policies empower staff to establish roles and responsibilities, including how to interact with federal immigration agents, how to minimize children’s learning and routines and how to notify parents about the presence of immigration agents. 

Ellefson-Porras says families also have a role. “Check to make sure all your paperwork with the preschool is up to date,” she recommends. “Who is authorized to pick up your child?” In some cases, she tells parents and caregivers to consider having someone else pick up their child and drop them off at school.

Finding Developmentally Appropriate Ways to Acknowledge the Threat

“The last thing you want is to scare a child,” asserts Thronson. “They are already afraid. Many children we represent have no idea they have crossed the border. They have no idea what immigration is. Why are we going to instill fear in them? At the same time, she notes, it’s very important to convey the message to kids: Do not open the door.” She advises parents to update their emergency contact to designate another person to pick up their children in case they get caught up in an ICE raid.  

Consequences for the Sector — and for Children

Setty notes that the threat of increased immigration enforcement has already caused damage. There have been reports of decreased attendance, which could harm child development as well as jeopardize funding. “There’s a concern that this will decimate an already-precarious industry,” she says. “If we’re talking about a lot of people disenrolling from Head Start or from other child care programs, it’s going to threaten child care supply.”

The situation is changing every day. “Something that might be relevant and apply now might not be relevant tomorrow,” says Setty. “The whole tactic of the Trump administration is to cause panic and anxiety and fear, but it’s important for folks to stay abreast of everything.” 

Resources for Early Educators and Families:

• (American Immigration Lawyer Association)
• (Child Thrive Action Network)
• (The Center for Law and Social Policy)
• (Catholic Legal Immigration Network)
• (Immigration Legal Resource Center)
• () (Migration Policy Institute)

As some child care programs kept their doors open, others  to . With parents pulling children out of early learning programs because of health concerns, financial constraints and other pressures, many providers suffered tuition losses and low enrollment, while struggling with the . By March 2021, nearly 16,000 child care programs had shuttered, according to a report from Child Care Aware of America, which was based on data from 37 states. Some experts  that the number was closer to  if all states were accounted for. Much of the . Additionally, without care for their children, many mothers left their jobs — a phenomenon some economists refer to as a “shecession.”

The pandemic temporarily devastated the field, but five years later, a number of these effects seem to . There are now slightly more  than before the pandemic, according to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. Mothers with young children have in record numbers. What has endured is a sense among the public and lawmakers that affordable, accessible child care is essential to a healthy economy. 

But experts say that such good-on-paper developments can cloud a more nuanced story. To better understand the ways in which COVID-19 radically altered child care and early learning in the U.S., I interviewed five experts about what they consider key to the legacy of the pandemic on the field. Here’s what they shared, edited and organized for length and clarity.  

Julie Kashen

Julie Kashen is a longtime child care advocate and the director of women’s economic justice at The Century Foundation, where she conducts research on families, caregiving, economic mobility and women’s labor participation.

The pandemic showed elected officials how much the public cares about child care.

The pandemic shone a spotlight on a challenge that many of us knew had been there all along. For so long, people had bought into [a] false argument that child care and early learning are an individual problem for each family to solve on their own. Seeing the impact of school and child care closings on parents and the workforce around the whole country, and at the same time [changed that]. 

CEOs and employers were finally understanding the [child care] challenges parents face. There was increased media attention on the issue because it was so prevalent, and also more reporters had firsthand experience with it. So as members of Congress got ready to put money into the airline industry, the restaurant industry and the retail industry — sectors that Congress has long been comfortable bailing out — we were able to make the case that child care is a sector that’s impacted, and that also impacts all those other sectors, and therefore needs investment.  

It quickly became clear that this was not being treated as a partisan issue. Leaders on both sides began stepping up to say, “child care needs to be part of our pandemic relief package,” and that led to significant investments. 

Now more elected officials are eager to be child care champions. They understand that they need to have a position and perspective on child care, that leading on child care is a popular thing to do. 

Mary Cheng

Mary Cheng is the director of childhood development services at the Chinese-American Planning Council, which has several early childhood centers and after school programs serving low-income families in New York City.

We’re seeing a lot more children with a limited attention span and families depend on us even more than before.

Providers feel exhausted by everything that’s been happening. I feel like they haven’t had a full break since COVID hit. 

There has been a definite drop in enrollment in our programs due to the pandemic, but [we now serve] a higher number of [children with] special needs. In our classrooms, like 50% [of the children] need services such as early intervention or speech and occupational therapy. 

I think parents were scared to bring them out for services [during the pandemic]. But it also has to do with the way that kids were being occupied at home. If parents were working remotely, they weren’t paying attention to children the same way. They were giving them screens to keep them quiet. Today, a lot of the children want that instant gratification. We’re seeing a lot more children with a limited attention span.

We’re also finding it harder to get parents to the table to work with us. When people are cornered and feel like they have no choices, and no connection, [the way they did during the pandemic], they close up. A lot of families are still not willing to gather together the same way as before, so there isn’t that same family support or peer system that they need. A lot of families don’t feel like there are systems in place to really support them. They want us to do it all.

Chris Herbst

Chris Herbst is a professor at Arizona State University focused on the economics of child care and early childhood education.

The child care workforce is like a leaf blowing in the wind. It’s very sensitive because it is inextricably linked to the larger labor market.

Prior to COVID-19 not a lot of child care research was focused on the workforce. Now, a lot is very much focused on the workforce. Pretty much every [recent] paper I’ve written has focused in some way on , documenting its , or how public policies — whether it’s the  or immigration enforcement — have affected it. 

The child care workforce is a bit like a leaf blowing in the wind. It’s very sensitive to all kinds of changes in the policy and economic environment because it is inextricably linked to the larger labor market. When there are shocks to the larger labor market — like if lots of  — that has obvious implications for the child care sector. 

The shocking piece of news coming out of the pandemic that keeps me coming back to the workforce is how hard it has been for child care providers to hire and keep teachers, never mind highly qualified teachers. In the wake of the pandemic, the pay in the low wage labor market really started to increase, but child care providers couldn’t keep up, so it made hiring and retaining highly qualified staff even more difficult, and you continue to hear that to this very day. 

Erica Phillips

Erica Phillips is the executive director of the National Association for Family Child Care, a non-profit dedicated to promoting high quality child care by strengthening the profession of family child care. 

The pandemic showed the world how important family child care is.

Before the pandemic, many home-based providers felt invisible and not supported. The pandemic gave a window into how important they are. Family child care providers were lauded as heroes for staying open when many child care centers closed, and a lot of parents were interested in their small size.

Some advocates leveraged that spotlight to talk about the systemic changes needed to support home-based child care. [When COVID funding became available to stabilize the child care sector,] a lot of family child care programs entered the public funding system for the first time. More began engaging with their state child care registries to access technical assistance or grants. In several states, family child care providers  and were able to collectively bargain, resulting in  or  or . 

We continue to see a significant hunger and momentum for ensuring that our sector is respected and supported. But as COVID funding has dried up, many family child care providers are beginning to feel forgotten. There are states that have invested in their early education systems who have been inclusive of family child care. And then there are states where the providers feel like they are trying to shut down family child care.  

The sentiment we hear from family child care is, “We are essential for a lifetime, not just for a pandemic.”  

Steven Barnett

Steven Barnett is founder and senior co-director of Rutgers University’s National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), which publishes an annual report tracking preschool policies, funding and enrollment in the U.S.

Because of the pandemic, we began collecting desperately needed data that our country had not been monitoring before.

During the pandemic, kids weren’t in classrooms so studies in classrooms were completely disrupted. A lot of data collection was also delayed. On the flip side,  of a representative sample of 1,000 families of 3-5 year olds on their preschool learning activities, including home learning activities. We wanted to see the impacts of this moment on kids’ learning activities, because a bunch of them were not going to preschool, they were getting this remote stuff — and who knows how well that was working. We started in the spring of the pandemic and we’ve been doing it every year since.  

Our data show that parents read less to their kids during the pandemic. It was like, “I’ve had that kid all day while I’m working at home, and we’re both too beat to do this.” 

Eventually, the reading bounced back up, but it never came back to where it was. Even in the spring of 2020, before people had really been wrung out by the pandemic, the . 

We [also] found that children’s social emotional development tanked during the pandemic. [Some] behavior problems and mental health issues seem to have receded, but the prosocial — how well do you get along with other kids part — hasn’t come back to where it was before. 

. That’s a problem. If kids are outdoors less, and on screens more, then wouldn’t we think they would have fewer experiences playing with other kids? These aren’t things we had been monitoring nationally, and we know they have consequences for kids’ learning and development. We plan to continue this work. 

The closure of a child care program can be devastating to children, families and the early educators who staff them. When a number of programs owned and operated by the same company — often referred to as a child care chain — start closing in rapid succession, it becomes cause for alarm and deserves attention. That’s what’s happening with , as multiple sites around the country are closing. This episode, which is one of the first illustrations in the U.S. of what can happen when a for-profit child care chain goes sideways, calls for close scrutiny. 

Guidepost Montessori is a network of more than 130 Montessori-inspired child care programs and schools serving children ages birth to 18, with most programs focusing on children under 6 years old, according to its website. Most sites are located in the U.S., with some abroad. The network is owned and operated by Higher Ground Education, an education management company that is backed by tens of millions of dollars in . Higher Ground Education pursues what one of its funders refers to as a “hyper-scaling” approach, and founder and CEO Ray Girn () once drew an , telling EdSurge in 2020, “I think that there is an opportunity to achieve [with Guidepost] what ride-sharing apps or Airbnb have achieved: show the world another way of doing education at a sufficient scale.” 

Yet just since the beginning of 2025, at least 16 closures have been reported by local news outlets: Guidepost has announced in Colorado (and paused a sixth site that was slated to open) as well as three sites in , two in , two in , and sites in , , and . These closures follow others that occurred abruptly last year in and in (the latter allegedly as a response to staff unionization attempts). Importantly, these are just the known closures that have been publicly reported in the news. In a Feb. 28 on the Higher Ground Education Substack, where the company shares weekly memos, new co-CEO Maris Mendes acknowledged that the company is “in the midst of closing nearly 1/3 of the school communities that have so lovingly been built over the past 9 years.”

According to Mendes, the driving force behind the closures is the same hyper-scaling strategy Higher Ground’s investors saw as a selling point; she writes that, “In our eagerness to meet the vast vision of our mission, we overextended ourselves, growing our school network beyond what we could effectively support, both financially and operationally.” Specifically, the company is struggling to pay rent to landlords. Last year, after reportedly missing multiple rent payments, spurring the landlords to change the locks. In December 2024, Guidepost in Missouri for nearly $240,000 in non-payment of rent and “unlawful detainer” of the premises by Guidepost.

Similarly, to about the Colorado closures, Guidepost asserted that “Our organization struggled to raise the capital necessary to support our schools, the majority of which were still recovering [from the pandemic], and suffering major losses. At many schools, we were running losses of $50,000+ per month that our creditors were no longer willing to subsidize, and we’ve had to figure out how to manage. In some cases, our landlords have been able to help us navigate these difficulties. They have generously provided rent relief, or renegotiated lease terms, in order to help an individual school to overcome its challenges and reach a point of financial sustainability. In other cases, that hasn’t been possible.” 

The pandemic point is an interesting one. The pandemic certainly threw many child care programs for a loop, but it’s worth observing that through two funding rounds in January and April of 2021 and continued to open new sites at a rapid clip, suggesting an aggressive strategy despite the pandemic rather than one hobbled by it. 

The trouble Guidepost finds itself in is reminiscent of other child care chain collapses or near-collapses outside of the U.S. As I , large chains like Australia’s ABC Learning and the Netherlands’ Estro Group previously saw rapid and widespread closures due to financial mismanagement or overly aggressive growth. 

While much more remains to be investigated, Guidepost may be on the path toward becoming one of America’s most significant child care collapses. It’s unclear what the outcome will be for the network, but it’s certainly worth asking questions about how and why this happened, whether there are any problematic trends that reach beyond Guidepost and pose risks for other chains, and what can be done to stop a company relied on by so many families and educators from getting in this type of mess in the first place.

A startling statistic scrolls across the screen: “25 million parents in the United States rely on child care in order to get to work.” 

Jen Bradwell and Todd Boekelheide, husband-and-wife directors of “Make a Circle,” a new documentary about child care struggles and advocacy, say they extrapolated this estimate with the help of Krista Olson, formerly a researcher at (CSCCE) at the University of California, Berkeley. This discovery made them feel less alone, but it also gave them pause. As the parents of two children, now 12 and 8 years old, they knew from personal experience that the cost of child care can put a dent in the family budget and even impede careers. After digging deeper and learning how widespread the challenges are, they aspired to raise public awareness of the crisis and present a more complete picture of this broken system at work.

And the system is broken, according to Anne Bauer, director of the preschool in Berkeley, California where Bradwell and Boekelheide sent their children — and one of the early learning professionals interviewed in their film. “Parents can’t afford to pay. Teachers can’t afford to stay,” Bauer says — a line attributed to Marcy Whitebook, founder and co-director of CSCCE. 

Bradwell reflects on Bauer: “She has told me that most programs tend to center the children’s or the parents’ needs first. But a mentality shift is needed. We need to think about the teachers first and center their needs, so that they can then meet the needs of the kids and families.”

“Make a Circle” has been playing at film festivals over the past few months and the filmmakers have been taking part in screenings and conferences wherever advocates, educators and caregivers gather. PBS will show the film later this year, which will garner broader attention. “It’s a California story,” says Bradwell, “but it has a national lens and should feel relevant to people across the country.”

This is the couple’s first film as directors. Bradwell has edited numerous documentaries, and Boekelheide has edited picture and sound on a number of films and composed music for over a hundred documentaries.

“Make a Circle” began shooting in February of 2020, just a month before the pandemic shut everything down. “It was such a wrecking ball for the industry,” recalls Bradwell. “Initially, we had to ask ourselves if we should keep filming or not, but then it became apparent that yes, of course, this is such a big part of the story.” Shots of masked interactions between early educators and young children evoke a combination of admiration and renewed astonishment at what we endured.

Rather than telling their own family’s story, the filmmakers highlight the voices of a half dozen members of the early education workforce. That’s where providers like Patricia Moran enter the picture. Based in San Jose, California, Moran helped found , a union of early educators in California, about 20 years ago and serves on its negotiation committee today.

Moran, 65, tirelessly champions the early care and education workforce in her state, which includes a significant immigrant population (Immigrants comprise of the child care workforce in Los Angeles.) “We all come from different backgrounds. That’s how children start learning about different cultures, different language. It gives them healthy emotional development that is so important. Empathy is what the world needs right now,” Moran explains.

Bradwell marvels at Moran’s determination, saying, “She continues to fight and raise her voice despite all of these headwinds — being an immigrant, being a woman, being a non-native speaker with an accent, being someone whose profession is regarded as babysitting instead of educating. It’s an honor when people trust you with their story, and it’s something that we take really seriously as filmmakers.”

As a child growing up in Bolivia, Moran recalls how she saw her father fight for the rights of indigenous people and endure prison and torture as the state tried to silence his voice. “Justice was his passion,” she says. Later, as an adult, she remembers him revealing to her that he was afraid.

Much like her father, the activist and early educator is committed to her cause. In addition to her role with the union, she works as a full-time child care provider herself. She’s faced a number of health challenges, including rheumatoid arthritis and a knee replacement, but hasn’t let that slow down her campaign. She even persisted when a scar from an old surgery started bleeding. “I don’t have time to think about the pain,” she says. 

A high point in “Make a Circle” comes when the union wins as well as $80 million for a retirement fund and funding for healthcare and training. “It wasn’t easy,” admits Moran, “but we did it.”

At the same time, the documentary doesn’t feel like a “Rocky” story where the underdogs emerge victorious. One beloved and talented provider leaves for a better paying role in a public school. Others contemplate leaving for jobs in the fast food and service industries.

Without becoming didactic, the film makes a powerful case for early education. Lovingly shot classroom footage highlights the skill involved in this work, reinforcing well-known data about the importance of the early years for brain development as well as the economic arguments for investing in quality child care. As pandemic-era funding dries up, U.S. policy remains a glaring exception among wealthy nations.

“Other countries pay a lot more money and attention to early education than the United States does,” says Moran. “And that’s really sad.”

At the same time, Bradwell insists that the statistic about 25 million parents should give us hope. “It’s such a massive coalition that’s just waiting there to be tapped,” she says.

Various media outlets have exposed the and . This film gives the public a glimpse into the lived experiences of the early care and education workforce. A compelling documentary about a social crisis, Bradwell believes, has to do more than confront viewers with bleak statistics. She and Boekelheide shot hundreds of hours of footage in search of “the stories that stay with you.” As a filmmaker, she had to think like a caregiver. “Once a kid has a trusted connection,” she says, “that’s when they can learn anything. That relationship is so important, and storytelling is very much like that.”

I promise this has to do with child care. What I’m describing is a silly and highly stylized version of concepts political scientists call . Predistribution is the idea that social interventions happen on the front end: They are investments in infrastructure (in this case, related to education) and conditions (for example labor laws and minimum wages) that help level the playing field prior to outcomes becoming clear. Redistribution is when the intervention comes on the back end, after income has been earned, leveling the playing field through “taxes and transfers” — basically, subsidies or other direct payments such as SNAP benefits or tax credits. 

Note that one is not inherently better or worse than the other: In both towns, the public purse was used so that every resident ended up with at least 10 potatoes. Moreover, no amount of predistribution, in real life, obviates the need for ; the field can never be truly level. 

However, one is clearly more popular than the other, and here’s where this becomes a child care story: In America, child care assistance has long existed as a form of redistribution, which I believe limits its political strength.

A quick historical refresher: In 1971, Congress passed the . The legislation would have started creating a nationally funded, locally run network of child care programs, and the benefits were set up to be widespread; one version that child care services should be available “as a matter of right to all children regardless of economic, social, and family background.” 

After President Nixon the bill with strong language about how the government would be overtaking the family, opposition became an article of culture-war faith among conservatives, and liberals quickly backed off universal approaches. As political scientist Kimberly J. Morgan , the American system “is a product of the controversies, debates, and decisions of the early 1970s. The door was closed on the notion of universally-available public child care services.” Both parties embraced a welfare mentality alongside modest tax breaks for middle-class families.

Thus, if you get child care assistance in the United States today in all but a very few states, you are either low- or moderate-income, and the assistance comes in the form of a subsidy voucher that offsets the use of your own income. It is, in other words, a classically redistributive approach. Contrast this with the predistributive public spending on K-12 education – — that creates a universal system accessible to the poorest or richest American. 

Historian Sonya Michel that child care subsidies’ redistributive nature make them part of “what scholars call a ‘residual welfare state,’ one that offers public support only as a last resort, when applicants implicitly concede that they are incapable of supporting themselves. A residual welfare state contrasts with a proactive or affirmative state that regards public provisions such as child care as a form of collective social good designed to achieve a consensual goal.”

Important for this discussion, American public opinion has turned increasingly against redistribution in recent decades. As a trio of economists , “less-educated voters have long favored more pre-tax-and-transfer interventions (‘predistribution’) in the economy and labor market.” 

Scholars posit various explanations for why, ranging from a sense that one’s income prior to receiving public aid is more “respectable,” to the idea that redistributive systems are “more opaque, corrupt, or inefficient than more transparent policy interventions.” With the American electorate realigning rather than race or other identities, redistributive proposals face an ever-steeper road to popularity.

Child care stakeholders, then, seemingly have two choices: make redistributive policies feel more like a universal entitlement, or reposition child care as predistributive. The former option is feasible: After all, certain tax credits, like the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction, are widely popular despite being redistributive. In states like New Mexico and Vermont that have massively increased eligibility for their child care subsidy programs up into the middle and upper middle class, the advances appear to be popular and durable.

That said, a more promising route may be explicitly casting child care as part of the expected level-playing-field conditions of American life, much as Americans of all stripes expect to be able to send their child to the local public school for free and to have certain protections when they arrive at their jobs. Indeed, for better or for worse, an intentional shift to such an approach is part of what enabled of universal pre-K policies.

The power of predistribution in child care can be seen in other nations. For instance, , all parents have since 2013 enjoyed a legal right to a slot in a child care program from the time their children turn 1; in Berlin, services are essentially free. Similarly, , many parents are seeing their child care bills slashed by hundreds of dollars a month as the country pours money into its child care system; it’s not a means-tested subsidy with a burdensome application, just the sticker price going down. Neither country’s system is perfect by any means, but these examples demonstrate an inverted way of thinking about child care: as pre-hoc social and economic infrastructure rather than post-hoc welfare.  

Either way, child care needs to be moved out of its redistributive welfare framing. That a combination of creating more truly universal policy proposals and encouraging elected leaders and other influencers to talk about child care as part of the American social fabric rather than a mere parental work support, along with other intentional, well-funded efforts toward cultural and narrative change. 

Until the construct shifts in the public’s mind, it will be exceedingly difficult to build the public will necessary for transformational changes. Particularly as working-class voters continue to assert themselves as a dominant electoral force, child care stakeholders would do well to flip the script and make it clear that there is no fair deal without universal child care.

Kindness Creators is an Intergenerational Day Center (IDC), a model for simultaneously supporting adults in need of long-term care and addressing the needs of families with young children. Combating an , the program also brings communities together in ways that have faded in recent decades.

Moran and Lawrence, both early childhood educators, have direct experience with older Americans and the issues they face. Moran has lived virtually her whole life around people with dementia, starting with her grandfather and continuing with her mother. Lawrence’s mother resided in a nursing home at the end of her life and had debilitating mental illnesses. 

The 2017 documentary “” (originally known as “Present Perfect”), which spotlights a Seattle retirement home with its own child care center, inspired Moran and Lawrence to approach Oak Park Arms, which is located in the economically and ethnically diverse suburb where they live. When they proposed their idea to executive director Moses Williams, they thought they’d have to try harder to persuade him, but he immediately gave the idea a green light – which meant they had to act quickly. Kindness Creators opened its doors in 2019, originally providing care for 12 children. Today, the program serves 20 children ages 3 to 5 years old across four classrooms.

A New Wave in Care

The care sector is stretched thin for as well as Americans. Amid chronic staffing shortages in child care and elder care, IDCs represent what called “a new wave” in care for adults and young children. The study’s authors assert that “IDCs foster learning opportunities for both generations and increase social engagement among older adults and children who need not be family. Intergenerational programs produce advancement in sensory stimulation; enhancement of self-esteem; increased positive socialization, and intellectual development for both older adults and children.”

According to , there are 15 such programs around the country, and interest has grown since the pandemic, says Donna Butts, the advocacy group’s executive director. “We’re all more aware of loneliness and social isolation now,” she reveals. “It’s not healthy for older adults to be shut inside their own little senior-only world.” She also cites and adds that senior centers are increasingly building child care centers because they see it as a workforce retention opportunity; staff feel more connected when the facility offers child care as a benefit.

Each day, the children and the seniors have most of their programming in separate parts of Oak Park Arms. They come together for miniature golf on Mondays, calm coloring on Thursdays and holiday-related activities such as cupcake decorating for Veterans Day. During a farm-themed art workshop in the ballroom, Marge Schwartz, one of the Oak Park Arms residents, who the children affectionately call “Ms. Marge,” shared that she takes part in every intergenerational opportunity she can. 

“I don’t have any children or grandchildren to visit me here,” she says, “so this cheers me up.”

Moran says the residents often express gratitude. She recalls one of them, a Chicago firefighter, once telling her, “You saved my life.” Sometimes, though, she learns about the impact her program has on a resident only after they die.

Death, of course, is a fact of life, but many early educators avoid the topic. Moran says the teachers at Kindness Creators don’t shy away from conversations about death. They draw upon developmentally appropriate resources such as the children’s book by Katie Daynes.

A Culture of Caring

Moran highlights ways that interacting with the seniors enriches the children’s education. “When Ms. Shirley had pneumonia,” she recalls, “We learned about the lungs and what they do. When a friend dies, we talk about it. We tell the truth and share our feelings.”

In other words, it’s about developing empathy, a core element of social emotional learning, which, in turn, makes young learners more receptive to new concepts. As Nel Noddings, the influential director of the , once Learning for Justice Magazine, “Kids do better in a culture of caring.” 

Moran describes encounters between the children at Kindness Creators and the seniors at Oak Park Arms. Residents have various challenges and needs that the children may not yet have exposure to — some, for example, are missing a limb due to complications from diabetes, others have cloudy eyes from cataracts. Mixing generations inevitably produces uncomfortable moments. Some children, she notes, are nervous when they first see a wheelchair or a tennis-ball-footed walker, but discussing disabilities in advance helps them process their reactions. Moran also says some residents are overly enthusiastic with the hugging, which gives teachers an opportunity to talk about communicating boundaries. 

Sometimes, she shares, unplanned delights result from intergenerational contact. Moran mentions a resident who relied on a handheld electronic device to speak after having his larynx removed. “The kids started calling him ‘Mr. Robot,’” she laughs, “and I started to ask them not to say that, but then he embraced the nickname.”

Whether silly or serious, interactions between the youngest and oldest individuals in a community represent rare opportunities to learn from each other and to develop social emotional skills that last a lifetime. “Our whole program is based on feelings,” Moran says. “This is where kids learn that looking someone in the eyes and saying, ‘Good morning’ can make their whole day.”

Support for this reporting was provided by the Better Life Lab at New America.

Downstairs, six children are snacking on pretzels and apple slices. Chase explains that they spend a lot of time outside, adding that her curriculum is nature-based and the woods and backyard pond make it ideal for the kids to explore. 

For Chase, working in early childhood education is her “life’s passion for sure.” She worked as an early childhood educator for 10 years before deciding to open her own program in 2015. Chase recalls that she was working 50 to 60 hours a week when she first started, which drained her, so in 2016 she hired a staff member to help. 

Her program, which serves six children ages 3 to 5 has been successful over the years. Because the , she always has a waiting list, rarely has vacancies and doesn’t have to advertise. That’s why in 2024, she decided to expand her business from a registered family child care program with one classroom to a licensed facility with two. This shift would allow her to serve 12 children full time — double the number she can serve as a registered family child care provider. The process, which she kicked off this January, will take well over a year.

Chase explains her plans for the expansion. She’ll add a new room on the first floor, which will serve as a second classroom for infants and toddlers and the cubbies will move indoors. And to transition from a “registered” child care provider to a “licensed” one, she’s required to meet a number of complicated compliance regulations. She has to upgrade her septic wastewater system which will cost $55,000; deepen her well for more water storage capacity, which will cost $14,000; spend another $112,000 to expand the space; and pay an additional $6,500 to fence in the playground. 

Chase is adamant that this investment only makes financial sense because of , Vermont’s landmark bill to bring near-universal child care to the state. The bill, which passed in 2023, aimed to increase access to high-quality child care and stabilize the early care and education workforce, including supporting family child care programs. Act 76 brought changes to various areas of child care and early childhood education, including significant updates to the , which provides subsidy payments to providers for children from eligible families. Under CCFAP, subsidy payments vary by income and the number of children that families have in child care, but providers now get a higher rate per child than what they typically charge. Since most of the families Chase serves qualify for CCFAP, this change nearly doubles the amount of money she brings in each week for each child.

There are more than  in Vermont — including family child care and center-based care providers — who could be impacted by the changes to CCFAP. One of them, Sherry Boudro, has been caring for children in the basement of her home in Windsor, Vermont for more than 30 years. Her house lends itself well to running a family child care program. It has a separate entrance to the children’s space, though it’s still connected to her main house by an internal staircase. Two fluorescent sensory swings hang from the ceiling, and the room is brightly painted and lined with bookshelves. 

“Before Act 76 I was living paycheck to paycheck,” explains Boudro. Now, she has more than doubled her income. Boudro was charging families $150 per child per week; now she receives $364 per child per week — a portion of which is paid for by the state depending on each family’s financial assistance agreement. Windsor “doesn’t have a lot of high-paying jobs,” she explains, so she couldn’t charge families more money, even though she was working all the time and barely breaking even. The extra income she receives now is going toward her retirement. “I’m 60 years old and I have no retirement savings,” she says. She’s also planning to make some long-awaited repairs to the space, replacing carpets and fixing the ceiling tiles, which droop down.

Act 76 Benefits Most — But Not All — Providers

Act 76 is the “opportunity and social change of our lifetime,” says Aly Richards, CEO of Let’s Grow Kids — the advocacy organization which spearheaded the bill’s passage. Richards, who has become the state’s chief champion of the bill and de-facto expert on how to bring a near-universal child care program to a state, outlines the success of Act 76 thus far. In its first year, the legislation created 1,000 new child care slots, nearly 50 new family child care programs, over 40 child care centers and 220 new early educator jobs. And in 2024, for the first time since 2018, more child care programs opened in the state than closed.

While ACT 76 has been a game changer for many child care providers in the state, not all have received the benefits. Tammie Hazlett, for example, runs a family child care in Vermont near the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. Most of the families she serves work have well-paying jobs at the medical center and do not qualify for subsidies, so she isn’t able to collect the higher true-cost-of-care rates. Another provider, Apryl Blake, serves two children who come from a neighboring town in New Hampshire, so they aren’t eligible, and she hasn’t asked the rest of her families to apply. “I have a problem asking them for their financial information. Not my business,” she explains.

Chase says all but one of the families she serves receives a subsidy, and the one family that doesn’t feels excluded and resentful of the process. The mother is a teacher and the father works in the tech industry. They don’t consider themselves to be well-off and they say the cost of child care is still a major expense. 

For some longtime providers like Merry Ann Gilbert and Laura Butler, these changes may be coming too late. Gilbert is 59, and though her practice is winding down, she still takes care of five kids a week at her home in Milton, Vermont. She is looking to retire and spend more time with her four grandchildren but Act 76 is motivating her to stay another year or two to make additional money. 

Butler, 66, who has been a family child care provider for 33 years, is also missing out — the families she serves don’t qualify for subsidies because their incomes are too high. Vermont’s support for child care has assisted Butler in other ways though, including  she took on when she got a master’s degree. 

With a 6-month-old baby sleeping in her arms, a toddler resting on a nearby couch and another toddler playing in her living room, Butler shares that she is retiring in June and moving to South Carolina with her husband so they can be closer to her family. She says she has given the families in her program notice, encouraging them to seek out other child care options.

For years, Butler worked as an advocate in the effort to professionalize the work of child care providers — something that Vermont may be the first state to do. “When I would tell people I watched children, they’d say ‘oh you’re a babysitter,’” she says; her work wasn’t recognized as a profession, but that may soon change. In late 2023 the Vermont Association for the Education of Young Children submitted an application to the state’s Office of Professional Regulation to make “early childhood education” a recognized profession; a  has been sent to the state Legislature for review in anticipation of introducing legislation, but Butler won’t be working in the field when it comes to fruition.

Butler has no resentment though.  She says she is ready for her next chapter and the warmer weather. “The next generation of providers will get the benefit,” she says. “I am satisfied that I worked hard for them.”

Her daughter, Ivonne Valadez Solano, was close to tears. With her newborn in one hand and her phone in the other, she frantically explained her problem. She had to leave for work but she couldn’t reach her mother-in-law, who had agreed to provide child care for her — and she had no other options because of the early hour.

Solano did not think twice. “Bring the baby to me. I’ll take care of her.”

Ivonne gave birth to her firstborn daughter in 2015. After her maternity leave ended, she searched desperately for child care. Center-based care was not an option because of her ; at the time, she was a supervisor at a major cafe chain and was expected to prepare the store for its 5 a.m. opening. 

With an almost hour-long commute in sprawling Los Angeles, she initially asked her mother-in-law to provide child care starting at 3 a.m. on the days she worked, but Ivonne had taken unpaid maternity leave, and with a lack of savings, she could not afford to compensate her. Her mother-in-law agreed to help for a few weeks, but was unable to take on an almost full-time child care job without pay for longer than that.

Fearful of jeopardizing her job, Ivonne turned to the person she could always count on: her mother.

The emergency 3 a.m. phone call between Solano and her daughter has led to nearly 10 years of consistent child care. Child care arrangements like that of the Solano family are considered “Family, Friend and Neighbor” (FFN) care. It is the most type of non-parental child care in the United States. It is by families of all races, ethnicities and income levels, and is particularly among immigrant and multilingual families. 

In California, FFN care is , so families who choose this type of care must know and trust the caregiver. Families who work nontraditional hours are to rely on an FFN caregiver — often a — to fill the gaps left by institutional child care, such as center-based and school settings. 

“Families across demographics are using FFN care,” says ​​Natalie Renew, executive director of Home Grown, a collaborative of funders focused on home-based care. “It is particularly important to communities of color because workers of color are disproportionately [working] in jobs that have unpredictable or nontraditional schedules. 

“We need to tell the stories of families who choose and rely on FFN caregivers, and acknowledge how children thrive and benefit from that loving and culturally appropriate care. We have to confront and dispel assumptions around who’s part of the child care system.”

The Case of the Solano Family

In 2005, Reina Solano immigrated to Los Angeles from Mexico. Her goal was to make money to send back to her four children, including Ivonne, who remained in Mexico with her extended family. She ended up planting roots in the city, and in time, got married and had two more children.

Ivonne immigrated to LA a few years later when she was twenty years old. She hoped to study English and further her studies in computer science and engineering, but soon found it was not that simple. Navigating the limited free adult education centers was difficult. She eventually found a program that fit her learning style, but it was almost a two-hour round-trip commute from her home via public transportation. She found a job at a fast food restaurant to pay for her transportation, but the restaurant was an hour and a half from her school by bus. 

It was all too much. Between the fixed schedule of her courses, the graveyard shift at her new job, and navigating the bus routes, Ivonne only studied a few months before deciding to drop the courses. 

“It wasn’t what I wanted,” she says. “But I needed to move forward.”

Ivonne has since worked in customer service roles. She and her partner, who she met during her first stint in fast food, moved in together before she became pregnant in 2014. 

Now, they juggle overlapping schedules that make institutional child care arrangements difficult. Ivonne works long day shifts in operations support at Los Angeles International Airport Thursday through Monday. Her partner has fluctuating hours with a pastry service Tuesday through Saturday. This leaves a significant gap in before- and after-school care for their children, which is exacerbated during the summer months. 

The couple continues to lean on Ivonne’s mother for their child care needs. Solano cares for her two grandchildren, Delilah and Mark, ages 9 and 5, in addition to her own two children, ages 7 and 13. In 2021, when the children returned to in-person schooling after COVID-19 restrictions eased, Solano began picking up short shifts at a local laundromat to supplement her income. On days her shifts cannot fit around the children’s school hours, she supervises them at the laundromat while she works. 

To this day, Solano refuses to ask for compensation from her daughter for the child care she provides, and she wouldn’t accept it if it was offered.

“She’s my daughter, and they are my grandchildren. How can I charge her?” Solano said.

This past school year, Solano cared for her two grandchildren overnight from Thursdays to Saturdays. Her mornings were busy. She dropped Delilah off at the local elementary school and then walked her children to the local middle and high schools. Mark remained home with her until February, when he began , part of California’s move towards universal preschool. 

Throughout the summer months, Solano took care of her grandchildren almost every day while her daughter was at work.

“In my culture, there is a tradition for families to support each other. It’s an asset to children for their grandparents to be in their lives,” Solano explained. “I am proud to help raise my grandchildren. I am teaching them our culture, our language. I take care to build their confidence [and] their self-esteem. If their parents cannot make it to a school event, I go. When Delilah asks me about my childhood in Mexico and follows up every question with another, I have the patience to answer.”

FFN caregivers often the cultural backgrounds of the families they serve, whether they are related to the children or not. As with the Solano family, this brings a of care that is preferred by families. 

“An FFN caregiver can provide flexibility… They can bring cultural assets and trusting relationships,” said Anna Powell, Senior Research and Policy Associate with the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. “In this case, grandma can provide a hot meal in her home that reflects the family’s cultural traditions. Grandma can provide bath time and bedtime, which other types of child care settings often cannot. This is in contrast to how policy and research often view FFN care, which is the worst option available or a family’s last resort. This is out of step with what families believe and value,” Powell adds.

When stakeholders discuss the child care system, they often refer to institutional forms of care. FFN care is an essential part of this system, too. It should not be forgotten or excluded from conversations about the child care system and how to support families and caregivers.

“If you have a child, or you have a child in your life, you probably know what FFN care is,” Renew said. “When we start talking about FFNs, we ask people: Who cared for you as a young child? Who cared for your children?”

Pseudonyms were used above to protect the identities of children; writing for this article was supported by the Better Life Lab at New America.

Recognizing the urgency of this issue, a group of 88 state and national organizations — organized by members of the — recently sent a letter to President Trump : Prioritize child care.

Child care is one of the rare issues that resonates , from the 2019 Trump White House’s to recent . Elected leaders recognize the challenges families in their districts are facing and the importance of prioritizing initiatives that will help ensure they have the options they seek. 

But we need action. 

It’s important that we advocate for an “all of the above” approach to expand child care options for families. This includes investments in trusted federal programs like the Child Care and Development Block Grant, tax benefits such as the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, incentives for employer-provided care, and strategies to grow the child care supply while supporting a qualified workforce.

With a new legislative session underway, prioritizing child care gives policymakers a powerful opportunity to improve the well-being of families and enhance the nation’s economic prosperity.

By Tuesday morning, the used by Head Start and many other federal programs to process payments about “delays and/or rejections of payments.” As of Tuesday afternoon, : the White House issued a suggesting that Head Start was exempt from the freeze, yet there were reports, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) that the Head Start payment system remained down. Later, as the day wound down, a federal judge , and finally, on Wednesday afternoon although still remain. Even if this crisis subsides, it is vital to remember who loses amid the chaos: children, parents and educators.

Head Start and Early Head Start from low-income families, offering reliable free child care and wraparound supports like parent workshops and access to medical screenings. These programs , where affordable, high-quality child care options are particularly difficult for families to find. These programs are essential community assets upon which a multitude of American families rely.

Introducing chaos and uncertainty into these programs creates a cascade of negative impacts. First, let’s consider Head Start classroom educators. There is connecting child care providers’ well-being with the quality of care they provide for young children. It’s one thing to try to do an office job when you’re unsure about whether your paycheck will be deposited at the end of the week. It’s another to try and guide the development of a dozen 4-year-olds, especially when that paycheck may barely be enough to make ends meet. (Of note, Head Start lead educators of around $40,000 a year, though there’s substantial state variation). This fact makes the Trump administration’s decision to put the freeze into place at the end of the month, just before rent is due, particularly harmful. 

J. David Young, executive director of FRIENDS Association for Children, a nonprofit in Richmond, Virginia that operates four Head Start classrooms, said in an interview that, “The stress, the anxiety, the uncertainty — it comes with the unknown. Staff are wondering about their jobs.” While Young and his staff are committed to staying focused on providing quality care and education, he noted that “when you start seeing things that affect you directly, or have potential to, you start getting really, really scared.”

What’s more, Head Start is already suffering from the same that plague the child care sector writ large. Many teachers are leaving, or considering making an exit, whether for a lower-stress profession or a higher-paying job. School districts often offer $10,000 or more than Head Start while, as one North Dakota Head Start director in 2023, “Walmart and McDonalds pay more than I am able to for entry level positions.” Since young children rely on stable relationships with caregivers, . But could anyone blame a Head Start teacher for seeking a different job instead of serving as a living political football for the next several years? 

Daniel Hains, managing director of policy at the National Association for the Education of Young Children, said, “We had a call with a number of our state leaders yesterday and heard people were concerned about their jobs in the coming weeks, concerned about their ability to keep their programs open.” Hains added, “Even if this does get resolved in a legal manner, the confusion is already causing harm.”

Similarly, the confusion adds stress for parents of children who attend Head Start programs. Many of these families, , are likely working insecure low-wage jobs. There is a strong , so many of the impacted families are already navigating pressure. Now, layer on the question of whether child care will be there tomorrow and it’s easy to imagine panic setting in. As Young put it, the funding freeze attempt represents “unnecessary emotional strain causing emotional hardship to families already experiencing difficulties.” As any parent knows, a , so a government that wants to do right by the nation’s families should be trying to reduce parental stress, not spike it.

To put it plainly, the Trump administration’s decision to disrupt Head Start — even temporarily — is harmful to educators, children and families. An administration that claims to be “” should not insert so much precarity into family life, particularly when American families . 

And that’s just Head Start. 

The administration’s move has potential implications for a huge swath of funds that impact early care and education — child care subsidies via the Child Care and Development Block Grant; the Child and Adult Care Food Program that reimburses programs for the meals they serve; child care funding for student parents via the Child Care Access Means Parents in School Program; and passed back in December. All of these operate as block grants that flow from the federal government to states. And this of course says nothing of the via funding for programs that support children’s health research, housing, community development, and nearly all of the policy areas that shape a family’s circumstances. More fundamentally, it shakes the trust between the family and the government, making the latter seem capricious and unreliable.

This move, coming just a week into President Trump’s second term, will surely not be his last foray into spending cuts. There was a political calculation here; one can speculate the administration knew that their order would be challenged and at least partially blocked. Yet the administration should not lose sight of the fact that such machinations have a human cost to the very families they purport to champion.

Duplicative counting is one of the issues that have long bedeviled Thomas and her fellow researchers. Let’s say a particular 4-year-old boy simultaneously participates in the and . Is he being counted once or twice in the IECAM database? In evaluating the efficacy of these state programs, Illinois’s newly formed , among other public and private bodies, needs to know the answer when determining the impact of each program.

Illinois is not alone in grappling with data on programs and services for families with young children. The newly formed Big Ten Early Learning Alliance (Big Ten ELA) was designed to address issues that span research and policy, like the challenges facing the IECAM team. Led by Ohio State University professor Laura Justice (who also heads the ) and Rutgers University professor W. Steven Barnett (who founded and co-directs the ), the alliance is open to researchers from Big Ten universities, which comprises 18 higher education institutions across 14 states. Members collaborate on research that addresses important early childhood issues and work together to champion and disseminate solutions to the field. The states involved collectively have nearly 5.8 million residents aged 5 and under, according to , a recent brief published by Big Ten ELA — and the alliance is dedicated to improving their early learning experiences and lifetime outcomes.

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“For these nearly six million children, it is crucial that their states provide high-quality early childhood education to ensure that these children experience optimal environments and interactions in the earliest years of life,” Justice and Barnett wrote in the brief. 

“States are increasingly taking the lead in enacting policies that affect early childhood,” Justice says. “One of our goals in establishing this alliance is to ensure that science underlies these decisions by state policymakers. We also want to leverage the expertise in early childhood at our Big Ten universities. Bringing researchers together through this alliance will ease collaboration and allow us to advance our understanding of crucial issues in early childhood by engaging our diverse research perspectives.” 

Critical Data Solutions

Why is data critical to service delivery, and why did the Big Ten ELA’s zero in on data solutions? “Part of the rationale for many investments in early childhood programs,” Justice and Barnett explain in their report, “is to capitalize on the potential return on investment of preschool participation, such that for every dollar put into the system, dividends are returned in the future.” If the data can’t be trusted, policymakers might balk at the price tag. Improving early care and education depends on a sophisticated understanding of demographics, services received, program enrollment and learning outcomes.

While IECAM has been tracking aggregate data for early childhood programs and demographic data for young children and their families since about 2006, the (ILDS), a project staffed by Northern Illinois University (NIU), tracks which early childhood services the state’s children are receiving over time and the outcomes of receiving them. The longitudinal data is designed to answer questions about which programs can be credited for increasing wages and income mobility. 

Benjamin Boer, senior director of data for Education Systems Center at NIU, notes that the complexity of data poses challenges and opportunities. “I don’t think people understand all the different programming that goes on,” he says. “There are prenatal programs, early childhood programs, home visiting, Medicaid-funded screenings for special needs and so on.” Boer hopes to establish correlations between participation in these various programs and third grade assessment data. (If you’re keeping score at home, NIU is not part of the Big Ten, but Boer appeared on the Alliance’s webinar, and their collaboration with University of Illinois makes them honorary members.) 

Recently, the partnered with ILDS to study the flow of children through the education system. — which comprises the state’s quality rating and improvement system along with education training and referral functions — is also using the data resource. 

“Other states may want to use data for accountability — justifying the expense — but our goal is ensuring that children get the services that they need,” Boer says. 

Sarah Clark, senior director of strategy and development for Education Systems Center, refers to the longitudinal project as “a space where researchers can collaborate and build upon each other’s work. And that’s critical because it’s not just from university researcher to university researcher, but also back to state agencies, who have such limited capacities.”

As Big Ten ELA continues to promote best practices on data systems, a more recent webinar in December examined two landmark studies on the effects of early childhood education — the , which began in the 1960s and followed students through age 40, and the , which has been ongoing since 1986. According to Barnett, both studies “show the full potential of longitudinal data systems to inform science and policy on early childhood education.”

Thomas sees promise in the “open dialogue going on between advocates, researchers, and other stakeholders who are invested in knowing more about young children and about the early childhood landscape.” Ultimately, this work will lead to what she envisions as “a public portal that will be used for a lot of our integrated data.” 

“We’ve been talking about these data issues for years,” Thomas acknowledges, “but I really feel like this is the closest Illinois has been in decades. And now we actually can see… maybe not the end of the tunnel, but I can see that little light.”

“The home is a warmer atmosphere for babies, infants and young toddlers,” Reaves says. “I’ve had a commercial space in the past, and this is more comfortable for babies.” The families she serves feel it too. Many of them stay in touch with Reaves long after their children have aged out of her program. Over the years, as the babies she cared for have grown into young adults, she’s been invited to high school and college graduations and even to baby showers.

Home-based child care is the , but these programs are increasingly difficult to operate. , Reaves has a side hustle to stay afloat: She’s a licensed insurance agent.

A pilot program funded by philanthropic dollars insulates early educators like Reaves from the income volatility that stems from challenges accessing public child care funding, such as subsidies and grants. Thanks to a guiding states to improve payment practices for child care providers, the approach could one day be scaled nationally.

Designed in 2021 and launched in 2022 by , a national funder collaborative centered on home-based care, the deposits $500 per month in the bank accounts of 45 providers in Philadelphia, in cooperation with the . Pilots are also running in and New York City, with plans for southwest Pennsylvania and Los Angeles in the works.

“It’s a guarantee,” explains Natalie Renew, Home Grown’s executive director. “Folks can expect that they’re going to be paid consistently throughout the project period.” 

Guaranteed income efforts such as the Thriving Providers Project only work if transferring dollars from the funders to providers is predictable and reliable. If the system malfunctions and payments don’t make it where they’re supposed to, then trust declines in public subsidies and in government as a solution. Renew recounts how the state of Pennsylvania transferred its subsidy management contract to a new vendor earlier this year, . (Missouri recently encountered a similar hiccup.) Because of these delays, she adds, many providers in Philadelphia couldn’t have paid rent without the Thriving Provider Project deposits.

Understanding the importance of selecting a reliable payment system, Renew facilitated a solicitation process for the project that included community interviews. (a civic tech organization) became the payment partner, transferring the cash that allows a solo provider to address unforeseen events that can derail operations. According to Beam CEO David Helene, the company is more than a technology platform. “Technology is part of it,” he says, “but program design, community empathy, showing up — these are also critical components to make these programs a success.”

Nobody thinking about opening a child care business in their home should do it for the money, Reaves cautions. Indeed, profit margins are increasingly thin. , a North Carolina provider who receives funding through the Thriving Providers Project, “At the end of the day, I am both the CEO and the janitor for my business. I’m also the cook, the curriculum specialist and the tax preparer. I have a master’s degree and run a five-star program, but after all the expenses I average about $14 an hour.”

According to the , authored by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, 43% of families of early educators rely on public assistance programs like food stamps and Medicaid. So what happens to those benefits when $500 lands in a bank account? When they enroll in the pilot, participants receive benefits counseling to help them learn about strategies that can help prevent benefits they may have, like housing vouchers or food stamps, from being interrupted. 

There are also local efforts to mitigate interruption. In Reaves’ state, for example, the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services collaborates with local guaranteed income projects to communicate any potential impact on public assistance benefits and eligibility to participants and County Assistance Offices. Some states have also instituted waivers to exempt participants in guaranteed income pilots, shielding them from loss of benefits while receiving the additional cash. 

Renew adds that tools like Beam were at the forefront of moving pandemic funding quickly to affected groups. “We’ve seen it work,” she asserts, noting the potential for scalability across systems. “Child care providers who operate on negligible margins often go hungry, face housing instability, are overloaded with debt and are fighting to stay afloat. If we want to maintain supply and meet families’ needs, then timely payments need to be a part of a toolkit of supports to the field.” 

In March 2024, Home Grown published a with lessons learned from the first year of the project in Colorado. One participant of the project shared, “I am the only one working [in my household], and I do find myself in a tight spot financially. … It has helped me a lot with bills, buying food and certainly sometimes even food for the children I care for.” 

For Reaves, the money makes it possible for her to pay a neighbor to cover for her when she has a personal appointment or needs time for self-care. That could be an exercise class or a manicure. “If you don’t take care of yourself,” she states, “there’s no taking care of anyone else.” 

She also notes that the extra $500 a month constitutes a meaningful acknowledgment of the importance of her profession: “They’re recognizing that, wow, these people are working hard.”

I want to be crystal clear up front: It is difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle the Trump administration’s approach to child care policy from its broader set of policies impacting families. If the President-elect makes good on his threats , we  that many children will be harmed. Similarly, if the Republican-led Congress pays for a  with , the negative impacts to low- and moderate-income families will dwarf any modest changes to child care policy. (Indeed, a  of cuts the House plans to pursue spares child care and Head Start but includes a host of measures that would likely harm this population.)

Quite frankly, it is unlikely that Trump himself has child care much on his radar. In his first term, Ivanka Trump was the driving force behind steps like the , while Trump’s  to a child care question during the 2024 campaign demonstrated a thin understanding at best. Ivanka  to play a substantial role in the administration this time around, and although most child care policy sits within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), it’s not apt to be high on the  for HHS Secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (although as a presidential candidate, Kennedy had a rather , calling for free care for all families with young children living below the poverty line).

The most pivotal actors on child care are, in my estimation, Vice President-elect JD Vance and a handful of GOP Senators. Vance represents a  that is ostensibly more concerned with strong families than pure economic growth, and  if done in a pluralistic fashion. Similarly, several Senators — perhaps most notably Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La.,who is the incoming chair of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, and Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala. — stand to play major agenda-setting roles.

Considering the , a plausible child care agenda for Trump’s second presidency may include some or all of the below points. Note that I exclude the  on the Child Tax Credit; while its fate will of course have an impact on families and the government’s overall budgetary math, it is a broad family support policy, . I also want to reiterate this is not a list of my personal policy preferences, but what I expect may realistically be on the docket:

• An Expanded Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit: In July 2024, Britt , alongside Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., that would among other things expand the maximum benefit for the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC) and make it refundable. This would represent a major improvement on a clunky credit  goes to families making over $100,000 a year.
• True Cost-of-Care Reimbursements: In August 2024, Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., along with , introduced  (CCDBG). Among other steps, this legislation would require all states to adopt true “cost-of-care models” to set their subsidy reimbursement rates. That would represent a massive improvement over the  in which reimbursement rates are set as a percentage of what states determine programs currently charge in an artificially depressed market. Several states have already made this switch. There are trade-offs here, as implementing a cost-of-care model (which would significantly increase per-child reimbursement rates) without putting more money into CCDBG would likely result in fewer families being served — in essence, squeezing on two sides of a too-small balloon. 
• Regulation Streamlining: Deregulating child care  for not wanting to fix the structural problems in the system — and in the worst cases, can . However, over the decades, regulations have stacked up such that the costs of some outweigh the benefits. For instance, states variously dictate a minimum height of fencing around playgrounds, minimum inches of ground cover, and floor areas in which carpeting is acceptable; licensing checklists . There are also zoning and housing regulations that . North Carolina Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx and Washington Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez recently  to remove certain regulations around food preparation for child care providers. While I believe the entire topic should be approached cautiously, we may well see more bills in this vein. 
• More Support for Employer-Sponsored Child Care: I have  around the trend of leaning on employers as a core child care solution, as opposed to positioning them as advocates for universal solutions which include corporate taxation. That said, there’s little question that promoting employer-sponsored care has been a popular strategy for both parties in recent years. To that end, another part of the Britt-Kaine proposal would majorly increase what is known as the , which defrays company costs for providing child care benefits to their employees.
• Stronger Policies for Family, Friend and Neighbor (FFN) Caregivers and Stay-at-Home Parents: Vance and other conservative thinkers — as well as  — have pointed out that federal child care policy tends to privilege licensed programs over “informal care.” While FFN caregivers are technically eligible to receive CCDBG subsidies, the process can be arduous . Current policy is also silent on stay-at-home parents. Various proposals have popped up in the last year to treat FFN caregivers and stay-at-home parents more fairly, such as Democratic California Rep. Ro Khanna’s proposal to pay all FFNs a minimum of $15 per hour and provide a monthly stipend of $300 for stay-at-home parents and Sen. Marco Rubio’s, R-Fla. proposal to make CCDBG subsidies more readily available for certain members of these groups and at higher rates. It’s important for policymakers to keep in mind that this is not an either-or equation. Parent choice cuts both ways and more federal support is needed for both licensed and unlicensed providers, for families  and families where parents work outside the home. 

It’s impossible to know what Trump’s second presidency will mean for child care. We are in the midst of  and it’s a highly variable situation with a wide range of possible outcomes. Child care could be put on the backburner entirely; Head Start funding could still get caught in the budgetary crosshairs; the child care system could be consumed by across-the-board cuts to discretionary funding. As we enter 2025, and more becomes clear in the coming months, I look forward to unpacking the news together.

The partnership, initiated by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and The Kresge Foundation, and now funded by seven other philanthropic organizations, has raised $9.6 million to date. The group was spurred by a clause in the  of 2022, which is intended to expand manufacturing in the U.S. (CHIPS stands for “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors.”)  

The bill requires manufacturers applying for over $150 million in CHIPS funding to submit plans to provide child care for both facility and construction workers. Jonathan Hui, a senior program officer at The Kresge Foundation, credits designers of the package for “capturing the link between infrastructure and child care that is often underlooked.” 

Katie Beckmann, the national policy director at the Packard Foundation, agrees that this intersection is key. “This isn’t only about expansion and creation of manufacturing in parts of the country that have often been left behind,” Beckmann says. “Business begets business, which further drives the need for quality, affordable child care in these communities. Ultimately, we hope this work will strengthen our argument for additional public dollars to be put into child care. It also has the potential to enlist small and big businesses as allies.”

The philanthropic partnership was announced in June 2024 at the inaugural National Child Care Innovation Summit, an event centered on the critical role of child care for working parents. During the summit, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said, “Child care is not only a social issue or a ‘women’s issue.’ It is also an economic issue. In fact, I’d argue it’s one of the most critical economic issues affecting families, businesses and communities today. The lack of investment in our care infrastructure is costing us dearly. There’s a generation of Americans in their prime working years caught between their jobs and caring for children or elderly relatives.”

The partnership aims to increase child care supply and improve the quality of care and is beginning with pilots in Arizona, Ohio, Michigan and New Hampshire. Child care is especially hard to find in these four states, and employees showing up to build or operate the new facilities will need help locating and paying for safe and supportive child care settings so that their children can thrive while they work.

The foundations are developing their plans in collaboration with leaders and advocates in each state. “We’re coming together and co-creating child care solutions that expand child care supply and enhance quality,” says Beckmann, who adds that designing solutions that meet the needs of the whole community takes time and patience.

“We need a national strategy for early childhood,” Hui argues, “in the sense that there needs to be a national commitment to investing in early childhood, but how that shows up in community is deeply contextual.” 

Existing infrastructure and relationships in each state will help the partnership to identify opportunities and connect the dots among: 

• Businesses: This includes the manufacturer, child care providers and other community businesses that play a role in the local economy. 
• Governments: This includes state and local departments and elected officials who can provide guidance on the regulatory environment in which new child care programs will arise. 
• Advocates: This includes groups representing the interests of families and child care providers who can share insights that can inform investments and decisions.
• Funding Leaders: This includes, most notably, Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs), which are uniquely suited to blend and grade federal and state funding streams to get the maximum benefit out of each public and private investment.

Learning from Past Partnerships

The Investing in America Child Care Partnership intends to draw lessons from existing and emerging solutions that are already underway. For example, while not part of the partnership, a new facility on Detroit’s east side embodies the type of project that CDFIs can help usher into existence. The 15,000-square-foot McClellan Early Childhood Center features eight classrooms providing 96 new seats for early learners. This project, which took five years to implement and cost $8.75 million, offers the stakeholders involved in the partnership a road map for realizing plans in partnership with community.

“The lessons learned from building McClellan are going to be critical to how we think about blending and braiding facilities funding,” says Hui.

Kirby Burkholder, president of core business solutions at , the CDFI that facilitated the , explains that CDFIs have a unique value for the ecosystem: “Manufacturers use language like ‘employee attraction, employee retention, employee satisfaction.’ We use language like ‘transformational community development, aligning programmatic and facilities quality.’ But we’re talking about the same thing. We’re the translators.” 

Burkholder says CDFIs like IFF (which just wrapped up  $59 million of American Rescue Plan money through the state of Michigan that went out to 1,005 providers),   and the  organize and activate capital. “That’s how government money reaches Main Street,” he explains. “We’re CDFIs that have evolved a whole infrastructure, with a community and data insights team that does the needs analysis that informs decision making.” 

Taking time to listen and collaborate does not detract from the urgency of the crisis that the partnership is tackling. “Across the country,” Hui notes, “working families are worrying every day about the trade off between providing high-quality care for their children and being able to enter or reenter the workforce or stay in the workforce.” 

Successful partnerships, he maintains, will generate not just an increased supply of quality child care in the communities they are targeting but also “longstanding systems solutions that really change how our country thinks about child care.”

At a time when government funding of all kinds —  — could be under scrutiny, philanthropic support can make a difference in making sure investments work on the local level. 

Beckmann notes an additional benefit of success: “Demonstrating that government can work for its people. This is an important moment to learn about what works and doesn’t work in creating a child care ecosystem that helps children and families thrive.” 

One of the philanthropic organizations that helps fund the Investing in America Child Care Partnership is Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies. That foundation also provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

As someone who has been  of large, investor-backed, for-profit child care chains, KinderCare’s move has me pondering a few questions: why did they go public, what can we learn from their IPO-related business disclosures, and what does this all mean for the future of large, for-profit child care chains and the child care system writ large? 

Why An IPO?

While uncovering the ins and outs of business decisions always requires a degree of speculation, going public wasn’t a smooth path for KinderCare or its former owner, the Swiss private equity firm Partners Group, which still maintains a controlling share in KinderCare (more on that in a minute). In 2021, KinderCare first considered, , an IPO for undisclosed reasons. Then, in the summer of 2023, it  that Partners Group was seeking bids to sell 50% of KinderCare to another investment firm. Clearly, they were unsuccessful.

It’s not just the IPO that’s important to look at, there’s another factor at play: debt. As Brooke DiPalma  in Yahoo Finance, “The company plans to use the [IPO] proceeds to pay back debt. As of June 29, the company had $1.5 billion in outstanding debt, plus $104.2 million available for borrowing under its credit facilities and outstanding letters of credit of $55.8 million.” DiPalma added that KinderCare CEO Paul Thompson said, “Most of [the IPO proceeds are] going to paying down debt,” and that was a key interest in going public. 

Even after the IPO, S&P Global’s bond ratings  KinderCare a B+, which is considered below “investment grade,” although thanks to the debt paydown, it represents an improvement over . This suggests that the company was overstretching itself financially, and arguably introducing undue risk into the nation’s child care system.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen high debt crop up in child care. Although the U.S. has been spared to date, there have been multiple instances of large, debt-riddled child care chains collapsing, such as Australia’s  and the Netherlands’ , before wiggling their way out of trouble with support from government or financial institutions. KinderCare itself became so indebted in the late 1980s and early ‘90s that . According to DiPalma’s coverage in Yahoo Finance, David Trainer, CEO of the investment research firm New Constructs, expressed skepticism about KinderCare, calling it “unprofitable and very expensive stock,” and adding that, “It looks like a private equity bailout.” 

What Can We Learn From IPO-related Business Disclosures?

This is where the fact that Partners Group retains a controlling interest comes in. KinderCare’s owners appear less dedicated to creating a sustainable business model as they are to maximizing profit. In a post-IPO analysis, S&P Global notes: “We believe the company’s highly leveraged financial risk profile points to corporate decision-making that prioritizes the interests of controlling owners. This also reflects private equity sponsors’ generally finite holding periods and focus on maximizing shareholder returns.”

I am frequently asked how a child care company could possibly make enough money, given the sectors’ difficult economics, to justify interest from investors seeking high returns. One helpful facet of a company IPO is that they are required to submit numerous legal documents, including a comprehensive detailing of company dealings known as a prospectus. The following three revelations from KinderCare’s  stood out to me:

1. KinderCare is willing to close centers because they are financially underperforming. In the prospectus, under a heading called “Competitive Strengths,” the document states: “We believe the quality of our portfolio is also differentiated from our peers due to prior center optimization efforts, a successful acquisition track record, consistent processes and investments, and a suburban-focused center network. From 2012 to 2017, we strategically closed 380 underperforming centers.” These closures, the prospectus explains, allowed KinderCare to increase revenue and enrollment at their remaining centers. 
2. KinderCare is increasingly focused on affluent families rather than serving families with a broad range of income levels.KinderCare has long stood out as one of the few large chains that  on child care subsidy. Yet in the prospectus, the company writes of, “Strong tailwinds supporting demand for premium ECE offerings,” due to the growing number of U.S. households with income of at least $140,000. The prospectus also notes that targeted acquisitions of other chains in recent years have given KinderCare “access to the premium ECE market — resulting in a quality portfolio with density in suburban communities.” Given KinderCare’s size and growth trajectory, this suggests a future in which there are more child care haves and have-nots.
3. KinderCare benefits when the broader child care system fails. According to the prospectus, the company seeks to “Increase same-center revenues through improved occupancy and consistent price increases across our portfolio offerings.” It says: “We employ a multipronged strategy to increase same-center revenues through enrollment and tuition rate increases … As a scaled provider, we believe we are well positioned to benefit from the combined impacts of growing ECE demand and potential supply reductions driven by center closures as stimulus funding sunsets.” In essence, KinderCare is saying that they have an interest in a child care system characterized by scarcity and the ability to charge high fees. 

What Does This Mean for the Future of Large, For-Profit Child Care Companies and the Child Care System Writ Large?

As I and  of investor involvement in child care have pointed out, the question here isn’t whether it’s inherently a problem for a company to try to make money or to try to identify customers who can pay a premium. Families making over $140,000 need and deserve good child care options, too. The question is whether profit-maximizing investment is , and what a growing investor trend means for efforts to create a universally affordable, accessible and high-quality system with well-compensated educators. 

Consider again that KinderCare closed nearly 400 centers(!) due to the fact they were not bringing in enough revenue. While we are not privy to the specifics of those decisions, that degree of closures, at a time when licensed  were spreading, should raise eyebrows if not hackles. Did the company — which, according to its prospectus, compensates its executives with millions of dollars in salary and stock options, and is backed by a  with over $200 billion of assets — do everything possible to keep those centers open and continue serving families?

It is crucially important to distinguish between large for-profit chains backed by investors seeking high levels of financial returns (be they , shareholders, venture capitalists or other forms of institutional finance) and smaller for-profit child care programs. Nearly all family child care programs are organized as for-profits, as are independent small businesses with one or two centers, and these typically do not have institutional investors. The two types of for-profit providers — small businesses and large chains — are qualitatively different, with massively divergent levels of profit-maximizing pressure. Public policy should treat them as such.

That’s why Massachusetts has set such an important precedent by becoming the first state to . For the Bay State, any for-profit provider with 10 or more licenses in the state is considered its own category for the purposes of accessing state child care grants. Other states may choose to set the bar at a different level, but either way, a distinction should be made. Since these large for-profit chains are a separate class of provider, they require specialized oversight to hold them accountable for treating parents, children and staff well; to ensure that public funds are used for the public good; and to safeguard against risky financial maneuvers that could put the larger child care system at risk.

KinderCare’s IPO proves, yet again, that these chains aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. We’re overdue in reckoning with their role in our child care system.

In word and action, the 2024 election cycle has shown that child care may be closer to an open window than our bitterly divided politics would suggest possible — if the parties are willing to accept that they now broadly agree on child care more than they disagree.

This convergence has been brewing for some time, and it represents a meaningful shift. For decades following President Richard Nixon’s of the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have established a nationally-funded, locally-run network of child care programs, most Republicans wanted little to do with broad-based child care reform. In his 2009 book “The Tragedy of Child Care in America,” eminent child care expert Edward Zigler that since Nixon’s veto, “a powerful social conservative movement has thwarted efforts by child advocates to create a [federally-supported] system of child care.” Instead, child care has been lumped into welfare policy, an area with low levels of government support where benefits are typically limited to low-income families.

Yet child care has been a growing pain point, even in red states, with increasingly obvious impacts on families and economies making it more difficult for Republican legislators to ignore. And , according to Moriah Balingit, early education reporter at The Associated Press, who reported in February that, “In 2021, Congress passed $24 billion of pandemic aid for child care businesses, an unprecedented federal investment. Now, as that aid dries up, Republican state lawmakers across the country are embracing plans to support child care — and even making it central to their policy agendas.”

This shift reached a new zenith during the , when Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance said that when it comes to child care shortages, “look, we’re going to have to spend more money.” (In fact, JD Vance and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz agreed several times during the debate’s child care section.)

At the congressional level, we have seen Republican leaders accept certain premises that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago. In 2022, Republican Sens. Tim Scott and Richard Burr to reauthorize the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act that would have made child care free for all families making less than 75% of their State Median Income (SMI) and cost no more than 7% of income for families making under 150% of SMI. The legislation drew Republican co-sponsors. Similarly, this August, Republican Senator Deb Fischer of a reauthorization bill that allows states to apply to expand eligibility to serve more working families using subsidy funds, while boosting per-child reimbursement rates up to the true cost of quality. 

On the Democratic side, there has been substantial movement to better include family, friends & neighbor caregivers (FFNs) — who collectively — and even stay-at-home parents. For instance, Rep. Ro Khanna recently that would, among other things, create a robust payment system for FFNs and offer stay-at-home parents a $300 per month stipend until their child turns 3 years old. (Full disclosure: I advised Khanna’s office during the bill’s development).

It is important not to oversell the case. There are still enormous unresolved policy questions 

related to the streams in Kingdon’s framework, particularly around funding levels. The bills introduced by Sens. Scott, Burr and Fischer contain no mandatory appropriations, making them essentially unfunded mandates that would go through a torturous appropriations process every year. For example, expanding eligibility to serve more families across a broader range of income levels does little good if child care subsidy applications are frozen due to underfunding, as they are in . 

Some Republicans, such as Wisconsin and South Dakota , continue to question whether there is any role for the government in child care funding. And there remains as well as drastically different visions for an ideal system (and the price tag that comes along with each one). It’s important to be clear-eyed: A divided government is highly unlikely to bring massive transformation.

Yet all that being true, 2024 has brought an opportunity to move the goalposts and spike the football. It would be a sign of enormous progress if both sides can agree upon certain principles — that governmental child care supports should no longer be considered only properly targeted toward low-income families, but instead seen as a need for families across a wide income range; that programs should be reimbursed at the true cost of quality so they can pay their staff well and run a strong operation; that parents should have access to inclusive child care options including FFNs.

There has been forward movement recently. In January, a bipartisan group of family policy experts convened by the Convergence Collaborative on Supports for Working Families, a project run by , released a echoing many of these principles. Such agreement, of course, still leaves important unresolved arguments about funding levels and technical policy design, and the contours of those discussions will naturally be shaped by the election outcomes. But in any upcoming political configuration, child care as an issue isn’t going anywhere. The real question will be, can the parties stop sniping at each other long enough to realize the first steps toward a bipartisan solution may be closer than anyone realizes?

More licensed child care programs in North Carolina are closing their doors as the state approaches the expiration of pandemic-era stabilization funding.

According to provided by the NC Child Care Resource and Referral Council (CCR&R) in partnership with the NC Division of Child Development and Early Education (DCDEE), the state has experienced a net loss of almost 5% of programs since February 2020.

Closures of licensed child care programs have been outpacing the opening of new programs since at least June 2023 — and now the rate of that trend appears to be increasing.

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Between June and December 2023, the state had a net loss of 34 programs. But in just the first three months of 2024, the net loss was 41.

This pattern reflects what many experts — — have been anticipating since last year, when state lawmakers declined to provide additional funding that would continue stabilizing the precarious child care system beyond June 2024.

House Speaker Tim Moore, R-Cleveland, has said addressing the child care crisis is a “priority” during this year’s legislative session, but has not yet announced a plan for doing so.

Urban and suburban trends

Combining data from CCR&R, DCDEE, and the , EdNC analyzed the percentage change in the number of licensed child care programs across the state’s urban, suburban, and rural counties since February 2020.

Each of the state’s six urban counties has experienced a net loss of licensed child care programs. Durham and New Hanover had the greatest net losses of 14.3% and 13.2%, respectively. All of the urban counties combined had a net loss of 6.3%

The state’s 16 suburban counties have fared somewhat better, with a net loss of 2.8%. Nine counties had a net loss, Gaston and Union had no change, and five counties had a net gain.

Buncombe is one of those suburban counties that had a net increase in the number of licensed child care programs since February 2020.

The Buncombe County Board of Commissioners established an in 2018 to “ensure that every child in Buncombe County has an equal opportunity to thrive during their first 2,000 days.” The county is also home to the , which was convened by the in 2021, and envisions every child age 5 and under having access to high-quality, affordable early care and education.

Such local initiatives might help explain why Buncombe has gained child care programs while most other urban and suburban counties have stayed the same or lost programs without additional investment from the state.

Rural trends

The vast majority of North Carolina’s counties (78 of 100) are designated as rural. Combined, these counties had a net loss of 4.3% of licensed child care programs since February 2020, closely matching the overall state trend of 4.7%.

Of our 78 rural counties, the majority (44) experienced a net loss. In some counties, the loss of a single licensed child care program can have an outsized impact.

For example, Camden and Graham had the largest negative percentage change from February 2020 through March 2024. Both came in at -25%. In each county, that’s the result of just one program closing its doors.

Among the 34 rural counties that did not have a net loss of child care programs, 17 were stable, and 17 had net gains.

Among rural counties, there’s wide geographic variability to whether a county has gained, stabilized, or lost licensed child care programs.

Rural counties with net gains range from Person in the north, to Robeson in the south.

Rural counties with the same number of licensed child care programs in the first quarter of 2024 as they had before the pandemic include Mitchell in the mountains, Rockingham in the Piedmont, and Hyde on the coast.

Rural counties with net losses include Caldwell and Cleveland to the west, and Carteret and Craven to the east.

The overall net loss of licensed child care programs statewide — whether urban, suburban, or rural — could jeopardize North Carolina’s economic future.

Studies show investment in early care and education for our youngest residents not only enables their parents to fully participate in the labor force, but also improves children’s health outcomes, reduces their likelihood of being incarcerated, and provides the foundation for their educational and economic futures.

We’ll get a report on the second quarter in June 2024 — right before the arrival of the funding cliff that experts predict will cause a continued wave of not only program closures, but classroom closures, without additional stabilization funding from the legislature.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.