And at least one weekend per month, she provides all-day care to several children whose parents have to report for duty at the Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.

Jackson is also licensed to provide overnight care, which she does occasionally as needed. 

Through these unconventional arrangements, Jackson provides “nontraditional hour care,” and as her schedule suggests, it can take a lot of different forms. Nontraditional hour care is a poorly understood yet widely sought form of early care and education, generally defined as any care being provided before 7 a.m. and after 6 p.m. on weekdays, and any hours on the weekends. 

It’s estimated that about 40% of children under age 6 with working parents spend at least part of their week in childcare during nontraditional hours, according to a from the Urban Institute, a social policy research nonprofit. The report, which analyzed household survey data from the National Survey of Early Care and Education, found this type of care to be more common among children from low-income families or in single-parent or non-parent households, as well as infants and toddlers. 

Families have a diverse range of circumstances and needs when it comes to care, especially working families with young kids. Sometimes, one parent can cover while the other works, or a relative such as a grandparent can step in to help. But in other cases, families must seek more formal arrangements. That’s where providers like Jackson and Desiree Reid come in.

Reid has been a licensed home-based childcare provider in the Bronx for about a decade. Before that, though, she had a long career as a financial manager — a role that required her to work late into the night and on weekends at times. In other words, Reid needed childcare during nontraditional hours before she became a childcare provider herself. Back then, when her son was still very young, she’d scrap together help from her mother and godmother during the week, and on the weekends, she’d take him to work with her and they’d hole up in her office. 

So when Reid opened her own childcare program and realized a lot of her families were doing shift work and needed flexible hours, she found herself adjusting her schedule. 

“At first it started with maybe one parent saying, ‘Oh, Ms. Desiree, I have to work till 8:30 tonight,’” Reid recalled. “What am I gonna do? Say, ‘leave your job, come get your kid and figure it out?’ No. So I extended my hours.”

The vast majority of nontraditional hour care is provided in homes, through a mix of licensed and unlicensed caregivers. Data varies, but across multiple sources, unlicensed care — and particularly unpaid unlicensed care — is the most used nontraditional hour childcare arrangement, followed by licensed home-based care, and then licensed center-based care. Erikson Institute, a graduate school in Chicago focused on early childhood education, cites data from the 2019 NSECE survey which that about 8% of centers and 34% of listed homes provide some form of nontraditional hour care, while the rest of the care supply is found in unlisted homes, often provided by relatives, but also some nannies, neighbors, friends and babysitters. 

For licensed providers, the shift into nontraditional hour care tends to come organically, as it did for Reid. Because home-based care is typically provided in a smaller and more intimate setting, providers often develop strong personal relationships with the families they serve. So when one family has a schedule change or needs extra help, providers may be inclined to accommodate them — sometimes without any additional pay, said Juliet Bromer, research professor at Erikson and University of Delaware. 

Different types of nontraditional hour care tend to get “lumped together,” Bromer said. But that can conflate the distinct experiences of providers caring for children during early mornings, late nights, overnight and on weekends.

“Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about nontraditional hour care as this monolithic thing, because it isn’t,” said Bromer, who has studied this domain in Illinois. 

Each type of care comes with its own sets of challenges, routines and objectives. During weekend care — the most time for children to be in nontraditional hour care, according to the Urban Institute — many providers tend to offer children more downtime than they would during traditional weekday hours, said Diane Schilder, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who led the think tank’s research on nontraditional hour care in 2023. That reflects what parents have said they want during weekend care for their children: a greater focus on play and rest, much like they would have if their parents were able to be with them. 

That’s true for Jackson, the provider in Alabama, who said the biggest difference in how she runs her program on the weekends, compared to a weekday, is that she gives the children more time to relax. 

“The schedule has been so rigid during the week,” Jackson said. “I get it. They need the downtime. … They need that time to just rest.”

What that looks like in practice, she said, is extended time outdoors and more free time to do activities like puzzles and drawing. Just because their parents are at work, she said, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t get to unwind like other children do during their weekends.  

In New York, Reid’s weekend care is occasional, and a bit less predictable than Jackson’s. She cares for the children of immigration lawyers, taxi drivers and nurses. Often, one parent is available on the weekend to care for their kids when the other is not. But sometimes, their schedules will overlap and they’ll ask Reid to help. 

“As long as they can give me advanced notice and I’m available, sure,” Reid said. 

“I have staff, so if I need to step back, staff can step up,” she added, noting that she has one full-time and four part-time teachers to help with 14 children. “When I didn’t have staff, that was a different story. Oh, my gosh, that was exhausting.”

Reid and Jackson, like most providers who offer care during unconventional hours, also care for children during traditional hours. Cynthia Davis, a home-based provider in Washington, D.C. who operates 23 hours a day, distinguishes between the two by calling one her “traditional shift” and the other her “twilight shift.” 

When she shifted into childcare a couple of decades ago, she decided that she would serve children from low-income families, whatever it took. 

“If I was going to have a program, I wanted to be sure I could serve all parents, regardless of what their shift was,” she said. 

With her program located near a police station, a fire station and multiple hospitals, she has served children at all hours of the day — from 1 p.m. to 10 p.m., from 3 p.m. to midnight, from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. “That’s the hours some of the parents needed,” she explained. 

It’s a lifestyle that might wear on some people, but Davis enjoys it. “I’m a night owl,” she said. “That’s why I love overnight care. I love being up at night. Everybody is quiet. Nobody is disrupting you. It’s the daytime that wears me out.”

When she cares for children overnight, her adult daughter who works at the program handles morning care so Davis can get some sleep. “It’s why you need staff,” she said. “You have to balance it out. If you don’t have balance, you’ll drive yourself crazy.”

The most children Davis has cared for overnight, she said, is six. Eventually she learned that she couldn’t really care for infants overnight, since their sleep isn’t well established and they tend to wake the others. “Over time you learn how the children’s patterns are,” she said, noting that she’d strategically place an early riser farther from a child who sleeps in later. 

When children get dropped off for an overnight shift at Davis’ house, they must be bathed and ready for bed. She finds out from families what their bedtime routine looks like on a typical night — books, music, a bit of TV — “so we can mimic what you’re doing at home.” 

Most children sleep in twin-sized rollaway beds; she also has cribs, elevated cots, floor mats and air mattresses. She will put the beds out in the common area — spread throughout a spacious living room, dining room and back room — before the kids go to sleep. Then Davis posts up in her comfortable recliner chair. She has a refrigerator and table right next to the chair. She does not sleep when the babies sleep. 

In the morning, Davis helps the children brush their teeth, get dressed and eat breakfast. 

Soon, as she begins to think about winding down her working years, she plans to move away from traditional care and only offer the “twilight shift.” She’s a night owl, after all. 

Some center-based programs do offer care during nontraditional hours, but it’s uncommon and the programs that do so primarily serve a specific population, such as the children of shift workers near a large manufacturing plant or . 

“There are very, very few center-based programs that offer late night and overnight care,” said Bromer. “It’s unpredictable. No one needs overnight care every night.”

Many home-based providers will request a week’s notice or a few days’ notice for nontraditional hour care, but when families’ schedules are constantly changing, it’s not always possible. That is incompatible with the staffing setup in most centers, Bromer noted. 

Then there’s the practical reality, which is that — especially late at night, very early in the morning and overnight — want their children to be in a residential home, not a fluorescent-lit commercial building. 

Most centers don’t have space for beds, pointed out Natalie Renew, the executive director of Home Grown, a national collaborative of funders committed to improving the quality of and access to home-based childcare. What they have, instead, is thin cots. If given the option, many families would likely opt for rollaway beds like what Davis has in her home over “flimsy cots” in a center for their child’s overnight sleep. 

“In a home-based environment, children are an extension of the family, eating meals in the home, watching Jeopardy,” Renew said. “That’s a little more intuitive.”

For parents who work unconventional hours, it helps a great deal to know their child is sleeping in a bed inside someone’s home, even if it’s not their own, said Jackson. 

“It gives that parent more of a home feeling, versus in a commercial property, where it’s more of a business,” she said. “Families need us. They need the continuity of care. They need to know their babies are being treated with the utmost of respect.”

In many places, it can be hard to come by licensed providers offering care outside of standard business hours. Davis recalled a mom who would take the bus from southeast D.C. to her program in northwest D.C. to drop off her 6-month-old baby before going to her job as a security officer. She had to switch buses along the route, and when traffic was bad, it would take her two hours door to door. 

Access is one of the reasons that care from trusted family, friends and neighbors is by far the most popular option for parents who work nontraditional hours. (It is also the most care arrangement for families during traditional hours.) This could look like two neighbors who both work nonstandard hours taking turns watching each other’s kids in their homes. It could be a family friend helping out for a small fee. Often, though, it’s a grandparent or other family member.

These types of informal arrangements make up the “bulk” of nontraditional hour care, said Bromer of Erikson. Parent surveys have found that they prefer this care type for its flexibility, affordability and nurturing environment. 

“It’s not paid care,” in many cases, Bromer added, “but it is childcare.”

Tonia McMillan is an FFN provider in Southern California caring for her grandchildren during nontraditional hours. McMillan had a nearly 30-year career as a licensed home-based provider, during which time she did occasionally provide care outside of standard hours to families. She retired from that career in 2023, feeling ready to close that chapter. 

But then McMillan’s two adult sons — both single dads — had new babies on the way. At the time, she and her sons decided to “all get under the same roof” to help each other with expenses, and that included childcare. 

Today, McMillan lives in a five-bedroom house with her sons and two of her four grandchildren — now ages 9 and almost 2 — whom she regularly cares for in the evenings. During their dad’s late-night shifts with a trucking company, McMillan feeds them and puts them to bed. Some days, if he gets home especially late, she’ll also get the kids up in the morning, give them breakfast and get the older one to school. It works well, she said. 

“The only difficulty for me is my age,” said McMillan, who is 67. “Having to lift car seats in and out of cars … That’s part of the reason I retired. There’s such a physicality to doing childcare that people don’t realize. But here I am again.”

There are days when McMillan has to make sacrifices to be able to care for her grandchildren — she’s very social, she said — and that can be discouraging. But she loves that she is able to help and said she’ll keep doing it for as long as her son needs her. 

Still, she doesn’t view it as charity, and she doesn’t want others to see it that way either. McMillan gets about $1,200 per month in subsidy reimbursements from the state of California to take care of both children. 

“I don’t want to see this role being downplayed or portrayed as ‘you’re the grandmother, it’s your duty,’” she said. “That strips away the importance of this work — how it fills a void, how it takes care of a gap. But it also binds families and makes them stronger and able to do what needs to be done for their children, for their household. It is such an important role that serves such an important purpose.”

McMillan emphasized the importance of being able to provide childcare to her grandchildren in a space that is both theirs and hers. She can put the two children down in their own beds and then retire to her own room. 

“I can walk around in my moomoo,” she said. “I don’t have to worry about if my hair is combed.”

But the value runs deeper than that, too. 

“The comfort of being in a familiar surrounding with a familiar person who loves them unconditionally, it matters,” McMillan said. “My son doesn’t have to worry about calling or checking in, any of that. Just the trust factor alone carries so much weight. It carries so, so much weight.”

By mid-afternoon, Nabila Chehab has worked nearly a full day running one of Colorado’s universal preschool sites out of her home. She’s been awake since 5 a.m. and on her feet for hours. 

By 2 p.m., two 4-year-old girls from the preschool program remain in her care. They will be picked up in the next hour or so. Then the doorbell rings and two more girls — 5-year-old Amira and 2-year-old Nadine — burst through the front door and head straight to the back of the house, joining their peers in Chehab’s classroom. 

Chebab’s first shift of the day is almost over, but her second shift is just starting. 

Around 2:30, she prepares an afternoon snack of watermelon and Goldfish for the four girls. It is the first of several meals she will prepare for Amira and Nadine over the next seven hours while their mother works at a food and beverage stand during a concert at Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre, about 30 miles away. (����Ӱ�� is using the children’s first names only to protect their privacy as minors.)

As they munch on their snack, three more kids arrive. These are Chehab’s grandchildren — ages 6, 5 and 1 — and the older two sit around the table as she prepares fruit and crackers for them as well. 

The naturally lit, brightly colored back room is alive with the chatter and boundless energy of young children. If Chehab is losing steam, she doesn’t show it. The 61-year-old just smiles and serves. 

By day, Chehab is a licensed home-based childcare provider. Her program, which can accommodate up to six children at a time, has earned the from the state. These days, she is primarily focused on serving 4-year-olds in Colorado’s relatively new , although she enrolls younger children as well.  

Chehab is only a few years into this arrangement. Before opening her program, she cared for her grandchildren as an unlicensed . And prior to that, she worked as a teacher for 15 years and a director for five years at center-based programs, she said. 

Chehab is licensed with the state to provide care from 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on Mondays through Fridays, but she continues to help families outside of regular business hours. On Saturdays, she hosts a three-hour Arabic class for young children. (Chehab moved to Colorado from Lebanon in 2009.) On Sundays, she cares for three young children while their parents work. And then, about once a week as needed, Chehab cares for Amira and Nadine in the evenings while their mom works at the concert venue. 

The kind of childcare Chehab provides on weekends and some evenings, often referred to as nontraditional hour care, is used by about under age 6 with working parents. It is most often provided in people’s homes through a mix of licensed and unlicensed care. This type of care can take place in the early mornings, late in the evenings, overnight and on weekends, based on the diverse needs of families. Often, providers like Chehab make themselves available during nonstandard hours only after a family that is already in their care has a change in plans or needs more help. 

That’s what happened with Amira and Nadine. 

Last school year, Amira was enrolled in Chehab’s universal preschool program. Nadine would occasionally join her older sister at Chehab’s house, so both girls became familiar with the provider. 

The girls’ mother, Marissa Kishell, has been working at Red Rocks since 2022, she said, taking shifts about three nights a week during peak season, which spans from spring to fall. Kishell’s mom — Amira and Nadine’s grandmother — would watch the girls at night while Kishell went to work, but when the girls’ grandmother got in a serious car accident in fall of 2025, she was unable to care for them for several months. 

Kishell enlisted Chehab’s help in the evening for the first time back in January, when she had a one-off work event, she recalled. When the Red Rocks concert season kicked off this spring, she began to turn to Chehab more often. 

“No one had ever watched them, especially at night, except for me and my mom,” Kishell said. “With everything that goes on these days, it’s hard to trust your kids with people.”

She worried, initially, about how it would go — but more so about how she would do leaving the girls than how they would do with Chehab. 

“She’s always so welcoming. Her house is cozy and clean,” Kishell said of Chehab. “I was never worried about if they would be OK.”

Now, Kishell will typically get her work schedule about a week in advance, she said. Then she’ll ask her 73-year-old mom — who watches the girls for free — which nights she can take them. Often, Kishell said, her mom will commit to all three nights but then, as the week goes on and she becomes more tired, she might ask to offload a night or two. (Her mom recovered from the car accident, Kishell said, but her energy level is not the same.) That’s when Kishell will ask Chehab, who lives about a 5-minute drive away, to take the girls for a night.

After hours of playing, the girls tell Chehab that they’re hungry. With Amira and Nadine in the kitchen alongside her, helping as much as they can, Chehab prepares a meal of lamb ribs, brown rice, Lebanese yogurt, salad, hummus and bread. The girls sit down to eat around 5:30 p.m. with Chehab, her husband Yassine Ahmed and a family friend. 

This is one of the elements of Chehab’s care that Kishell deeply appreciates. Both of her girls are “very comfortable” at Chehab’s house and “have a lot of fun there,” Kishell said, but it’s more than that.

“It’s nice for me that they get more of a home environment, and they’re having a home-cooked meal, and it’s more of a structure,” she said, “than going to a random babysitter’s house.”

That’s important to Chehab too. It’s central to her philosophy as a provider. 

“I don’t treat my families like clients,” Chehab said. “I treat them like family.”

Kishell pays about $30 per hour for Chehab to watch the girls in the evenings — $15 per hour per child — which she figures is about what she’d have to pay for the average babysitter. With Chehab’s experience and classroom materials and quality rating from the state, she feels it’s a great outcome for her and the girls. 

After dinner, Chehab helps the girls wash their hands then takes them on a walk around the neighborhood, during which they spot airplanes flying overhead. 

Back at Chehab’s house, she takes the girls into the greenhouse in her backyard, where they look for ripe vegetables to pluck and place in nets. Chehab’s garden is varied and sprawling. Inside the greenhouse, she has tomatoes and cucumbers, along with herbs such as parsley, cilantro and mint. Elsewhere in the backyard, she grows green grapes, sumac, apples, pears and peaches, although she said the fruit trees have not borne fruit during this especially hot summer. 

Both Amira and Nadine come out of the greenhouse with a few cherry tomatoes and finger-length cucumbers. 

“This one is so big!” Amira says, admiring her cucumber. “I want to take mine home.”

Chehab helps the girls wash and pack their vegetables to take home later. 

Kishell saw the vegetables from the garden when she got home that night. The girls also brought home a flower craft they’d made. These kinds of keepsakes make Kishell especially grateful. 

“I don’t think they would get quite the same experience with anybody else,” she said. 

Kishell’s appreciation is not lost on Chehab. 

“She values my work with her kids,” Chehab said of Kishell. “She sees how they improve.” 

At about 6:45 p.m., Nadine begins to rub her eyes and show signs of sleepiness — she skipped her nap today, Chehab said. “She’s ready for bed.” Instead, Chehab will try to keep them occupied until pickup, which Kishell prefers.  

Kishell’s husband, Mo Shesao, will pick up the girls at 9 p.m. Shesao has his own car shop, where he works as a mechanic. He usually stays until the work is done, Kishell said, so if someone brings their car in midday and needs it back by the next day, he’ll keep at it until he’s finished. 

Some nights, the girls stay at Chehab’s later — until 10 or 11 p.m. On those nights, Kishell will pack them a bag with toothbrushes, hairbrushes and pajamas so they can get ready for bed before they are picked up. Occasionally, Chehab said, Nadine will fall asleep at her house. Usually, though, they’ll wait until they are in the car or at home. Both children are accustomed to a 10 p.m. bedtime at home anyway, Kishell said. Since she stays home with them during the day, they have nowhere to be in the mornings and will often sleep in.

Chehab reads stories with the girls until about 7 p.m. Nadine picks out, “Big Gorilla: A Book of Opposites,” and Chehab quizzes the girls on opposites. 

“What’s the opposite of short? What’s the opposite of night? What’s the opposite of heavy?”

Next, Chehab sets up a paint station for the sisters. They don aprons and each pick out three colors and a paintbrush. As the girls get going, Chehab says to Amira, “Tell me about your picture.”

Amira has combined her three paints to create a dark blueish-brown hue, which she is trying to use to cover the entirety of her paper. 

“It’s going to be different,” Amira says, answering Chehab. She thinks about it more, then adds: “Spooky.”

As they finish up, Amira tells Chehab and her sister, “Next time, I’m going to take this to the museum … so they can hang it up.”

It’s August, so at 7:30 p.m., it’s still light outside. The trio heads outside to sing and dance with scarves. Chehab gives no indication that her stamina is flagging. She continues to play with and engage the girls as if the day is new. 

Around 8 p.m., the sky darkens and the girls go inside to have one final snack. They eat pretzel sticks and drinkable yogurt with straws in the basement while Chehab finds them an age-appropriate show to play on the television for 15 minutes. (She watches the clock closely to make sure they don’t get more screen time than that.) 

Once the girls are settled with their snacks and show, Chehab and her husband roll out their prayer mats and kneel to pray a few feet away. Amira can be heard slurping the last few sips of her yogurt while her caregiver quietly recites her prayers.

Around 8:30, after night has fallen and with only a half-hour left at Chehab’s, both girls become more subdued. They lay together on Chehab’s couch, still giggling and muttering, but more softly now. 

At 8:55 p.m., a car horn can be heard from the driveway. Moments later, the girls race to the front door to greet their dad. Then they give hugs and kisses to Chehab and tell her goodnight. As quickly as they’d entered the house earlier that afternoon, they now exit it, leaving a strange stillness in their wake.  

Chehab’s night is nearly over too. She will prepare her Turkish coffee for the next morning, take a shower, pray once more and then go to bed. She’ll wake up tomorrow, without an alarm, at 4:30 or 5 a.m., she said. Then she’ll head to the gym, where she swims every day, and return home, ready to greet another group of young children. 

This story was supported by New America’s Better Life Lab Childcare Reporting Grant.

At 10:30 p.m. on a Monday in the Bronx, it’s bedtime for many children. But at Juana Grisel Peña’s apartment, 2-year-old Brandon is just arriving. Peña, who goes by Grisel, greets him with a hug as he joins three other children — 7-year-old Sage and brothers Legend, 2, and Legacy, 1 — who are playing with toys in another room as they wind down for the evening. (����Ӱ�� is using the children’s first names only to protect their privacy as minors.)

The four children are spending the evening at Al Despertar, a licensed, home-based childcare program Peña runs out of her apartment, which sits three blocks from Yankee stadium. Their parents are working late-night or overnight shifts: one at the MTA, another at a local grocery store, and a third at Amazon. Some of the children will stay at Al Despertar late into the night, while others will sleep over and get picked up in the morning. 

From Monday through Friday, Peña cares for up to six children in her overnight program, which runs from around 6 p.m. to 9 a.m. They arrive and leave at different times, depending on their parents’ work schedules. She has a staff of five childcare providers, three who typically work at the daytime program and two who assist her with night shifts. 

When Peña started her program about 10 years ago, it was initially only open during the day, but she quickly noticed demand among working families with jobs that stretch beyond traditional business hours so she adjusted course to meet their needs. Over the years, she has transformed nearly every corner of her home around the children she cares for. Her living room is filled with learning activities and brimming with toys; bilingual signs about handwashing and nutrition standards hang in the bathroom and kitchen; and a pile of sleeping mats are neatly stacked in a closet of the second bedroom in her apartment, ready to be set up each day for the children.

“I want the parents to go to work and be in peace,” Peña said. “I remember when I had my kids I didn’t feel that peace when they were in someone else’s care and I don’t want anyone to feel that way. I understand it’s not easy.”

Peña’s program meets a significant need for parents. Research by the estimates that 40% of young children under age 6 with working parents spend at least part of their week in childcare during nonstandard hours like early mornings, evenings or weekends. The care can be tough to find though since not all licensed childcare providers operate during those hours. “I went through a lot of trouble trying to find this place,” Sage’s dad said. “There’s not a lot of overnight daycares.”

There are countless small, yet meaningful moments that define the kind of care Peña offers — whispered bedtime stories, shared mealtimes and comforting nighttime and morning routines that help children navigate transitions.

The photographs below, taken at Peña’s apartment during one of her overnight shifts in August, offer a glimpse inside one provider’s experience operating around-the-clock care, revealing a side of childcare that’s rarely seen.

8-11 p.m.

11 p.m.- midnight

5:30-8:30 a.m.

This story was supported by New America’s Better Life Lab Childcare Reporting Grant.

For students starting at a , the first day holds many questions: Will they see any familiar faces? Who will they sit with at lunch? Who will they play with at recess?

“I’m this much nervous,” said Iman Fair-Seldon, 5, holding her hands about 4 inches (10 centimeters) apart. Iman will start first grade next month at a new school in southern New Jersey, near Philadelphia. Despite the nerves, she said she is excited to make new friends.

Starting at a new school or making a big transition, such as moving from elementary school to middle school, can be challenging. Parents may want to help but aren’t always sure what to say or do. Here’s some advice from both grown-ups and the ultimate experts: kids who have gone through transition themselves.

Schedule playdates and go to birthday parties

Parents of young children have significant influence over where their children spend time and with whom, experts say. They can seek out activities that create opportunities for connection, such as parks, playgrounds and birthday parties, and decide when their children are ready for activities like sleepovers.

“Initially, parents have a huge impact when it comes to the friends that children have,” said Dr. Asha Barber Sutton, a licensed marriage and family therapist and an associate dean of academic affairs at National University in San Diego. “More than we would like to believe, our actions as caregivers make a difference in terms of how children experience the world.”

Amira Fair, Iman’s mother, says she prefers to keep to herself, but she pushes past those feelings to help her daughter develop relationships. “I make it my business to exchange numbers and try to schedule monthly playdates,” she said. “One thing I tried to do, especially at her old school, was go to every single birthday function, say hi to the parents, get a present, see the family.”

Let kids navigate their own friendships

Parents can’t manage every friendship for their children, experts say. Instead, they can help children develop their own sense of what makes a good friend: Are they kind? Are they honest? Can you be yourself around them? Some difficult interactions can help children learn what they value in a friend and how to handle conflict, Sutton said.

Parents can also ask questions to help their children think about what they value in friendships: What qualities do you like in your friends? Who makes you feel comfortable being yourself? Those conversations can give children a framework for evaluating their own friendships when problems arise, experts say.

Jaiden Journet, a 14-year-old starting at a new high school in North Carolina, suggests parents ask their kids: “Have you found anything you have in common with anyone?”

Help kids get involved

Parents also can support their children through encouragement, especially if they are shy or anxious. Encouraging children to get involved in  or to try something new can help them meet people with similar interests.

Shia Watts, 16, says trying something new led her to some of her friends at Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, California.

“Last year, I was part of . I’d never done that before, but I met so many amazing people,” she said.

When Jamir Gonzalez transferred last year to Uncommon Camden Prep High School in New Jersey, he joined the baseball and debate teams.

“If you have any hobbies, find out if they have that at your school, and if they do, talk to the people that are there,” said Jamir, now a 16-year-old senior.

Once students find opportunities to connect, starting the conversation is the next step, experts say. Smiling, complimenting others and asking questions can help start a conversation and keep it going.

Iman, the New Jersey 5-year-old, remembers how she met her now “B-F-F-F-F-F.” It started with a compliment.

“I think I said, ‘I like your shirt,’ and then she said, ‘Thank you.’ And I said, ‘So what’s your name?’” she recalled.

Put down the cellphones — sometimes

Students may find it harder to start conversations when their peers are , wearing headphones or focused on screens. Experts say parents can encourage children, particularly teens, to put devices away at times so they can be more present and engaged with the people around them. One way to help:  at school, some teachers and experts say.

But being too harsh with older children’s  can isolate them socially, Sutton said. Still, parents should talk with their teens about expectations around technology, social media and gaming, including  online.

Technology can also help children maintain friendships when circumstances separate them, Sutton said. “If you move away, it’s no longer like, ‘Hey, I moved out of state, and I can never see you,’ ” she said. “We have FaceTime, and we can still stay connected to friends in that way.”

Even one friendship counts

Feeling connected and having a sense of belonging at school can have an important effect on students’ well-being. If a student feels staff and peers at their school care about them, they are less likely to have poor mental health, use substances or , according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and they are more likely to have better grades and attendance.

But a student needn’t have a large friend group to feel connected. Even one relationship can make a meaningful difference, said Nicole Hockley, co-founder and CEO of Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit that focuses on gun violence prevention in schools.

“Even if you only have one really strong friendship or one strong trusted adult, one strong sense of belonging, that can be enough to really positively affect your well-being and your trajectory through school and life,” she said.

For students who are nervous about starting over, Hockley said, it can help to remember that other students may be looking for connection, too.

“There’s also someone else just like you in that same space who’s also saying, ‘I would like to meet someone. I’d like to make a friend,’ ” she said. “It can be intimidating, but it’s not hard once you practice it.”

This story has been updated to correct that Jamir Gonzalez joined the baseball team, not the basketball team.

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Under the existing model, one group of kids comes for the morning and another group comes in the afternoon. A full day of care would help working families and provide kids with twice as much time in a trusted learning environment.

Six months later, she’s still awaiting a response, leaving parents in limbo about whether they’ll have childcare for seven hours each day or just 3½, as they prepare to send their children to her program in just three weeks. 

“We’ve been working on enrollment, on recruitment, on getting families into the system,” she said, “(but) families don’t want part day, so at this point, we’re going to have to backtrack.”

Historically, such a request would have gone to a program specialist at Lykins’s regional office, who would have resolved it within about 45 days, she said. But, in January 2025, the Washington regional office was shuttered — along with across the country — consolidating Head Start’s and completely upending the processes program directors had come to rely on. The consolidated regional offices are each responsible for more programs, so now, Lykins reports to a new office that serves far more grantees and has reduced authority and capacity for support.

“It’s a systemic nightmare,” Lykins said, adding that this request was just one of a number “that have not been responded to” over the past year and a half. Ultimately, these delays harm families and lead to additional costs, she said.

Lykins’s experience is hardly unique. In a of 157 Head Start providers from 33 states, about how the challenges they’re facing are impacting children and families, nearly 79% of respondents reported an increase in administrative burden since the closures of regional offices, and 90% reported that the level of ongoing support has declined within the new structure. The survey, conducted by the Washington State Association of Head Start and , a national advocacy campaign, was distributed directly to Head Start program directors nationally. The results showed that these impacts aren’t merely bureaucratic: more than 75% of providers reported that the delays and lack of support have resulted in significant impacts on children, families and staff.

Many providers reported in the survey that significant decision delays have led to increased costs and damaged community partnerships and have left program leaders feeling frustrated and isolated. All respondents had experienced at least one decision delay, and in many cases the delays amounted to double or triple the wait time they used to experience when their regional offices were still functioning.

“When we started reading through the results, what struck us was that it’s not like there’s one big smoking gun here. There’s just so many people who are experiencing so many frustrations and delays that it is really a systemic problem,” said Katy Warren, deputy director of the Washington State Association of Head Start who helped lead the survey. “Every day that a Head Start director goes to work, they don’t know whether they’re going to be able to navigate these systems that used to be fairly smooth,” she said, explaining that providers now wait weeks or months for communication from their regional offices.

The survey results were released just days after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a proposed rule change that would drastically reduce Head Start’s Performance Standards. Kennedy said his department was “removing unnecessary bureaucracy” that would return the program to its roots, but critics argue that if these changes are instituted they will effectively gut Head Start’s core. 

The updated rules eliminate requirements for standards such as low adult-to-child ratios; services such as medical and dental care; developmental screenings and individualized services for children with disabilities. It would also require most programs to conduct all education in English only. A 60-day public comment period is currently open and will run through Oct. 6. 

In many ways, the closures of the regional offices and the proposed rule change go hand-in-hand, according to Warren.

“One of the reasons why we are skeptical about the good intentions of the administration to improve the operations of Head Start programs and services is that we haven’t seen a real commitment to that over the last year,” she said. Staff layoffs, a shift of decision making from the regional offices to the Office of Head Start, and administrative delays — often stemming from a lack of clear and timely communication, have “not indicated a priority of efficiency and effective service to children,” Warren added.

Head Start has come under threat repeatedly since the start of the second Trump administration. In addition to the consolidation of the regional offices, the program has faced proposed funding freezes and delays, and workforce reduction.

Providers and grantees who reported to the shuttered regional offices largely heard about the fallout through word of mouth and panicked texts and LinkedIn posts. Many said they didn’t receive any official notice from the federal government until a boilerplate email arrived in their inboxes two days after the change and a number of them told ����Ӱ�� they went for months without a replacement program specialist.

In total, the regional staff who were laid off or furloughed — some of whom had worked at the offices for decades — served 22 states, a number of territories, and hundreds of thousands of children, pregnant women and their families. Local program leaders had long relied on specialists within their regional offices to help navigate everything from grant proposals to building repairs.

The recent survey asked providers to share the impacts of a number of these hurdles on the children and families they serve, with a particular focus on the closures of the regional offices. 

“What took 5 minutes now takes hours,” wrote one grantee from Washington.

“I have received no individual support or check in to see how I or the program is doing since the transition,” wrote a new Head Start program director in Illinois.

“It’s a constant whir of panic,” wrote a third from Virginia.

Nearly half of all respondents said delays or uncertainty around funding, along with reduction in staff support from the Office of Head Start has led to difficulty hiring and retaining qualified teaching staff. One-quarter reported additional administrative burden leading to delays in communication with parents and just over 17% reported an inability to purchase or repair equipment.

Lauri Frichtl, executive director of the Illinois Head Start Association, a nonprofit that supports Head Start programs across the state, said that last winter, one of her program’s buildings flooded after pipes froze and burst over the holiday break. She recalled one of the program directors reaching out to the Office of Head Start for assistance, but that help didn’t come in time. Ultimately, they were forced to move forward without federal guidance “because they couldn’t wait,” she said. “You need immediate answers when you’re in that crisis.”

Frichtl said that before the Illinois regional office closed, she received quick and helpful responses to similar issues.

“Usually you had your program specialist and you had a relationship with them and you were in direct contact with them, and you had immediate feedback, and everything worked well. You may not have liked all of their responses, but at least you had feedback,” she said. “Now it’s kind of just up in the air. You wait and see.”

Darcee Kilsdonk, executive director​ of Clackamas County Children’s Commission, a nonprofit organization that runs 13 Head Start centers in Oregon, has also experienced administrative delays and challenges after the loss of her regional office. Last August, following inquiries from parents, she submitted a request to redesign the center’s schedules to align them with local public schools.

Historically, such an application would have been resolved in a month or two, she said. But a year later, she’s still awaiting approval. “Every single month I ask about it. Every single month they say ‘it’s in process.’” 

Eventually, Kilsdonk gave up and decided to prioritize the needs of her families, making the schedule change in defiance of the Office of Head Start. “I was very open with them that I was going to do it anyway,” she said.

Since the closures of regional offices, Kilsdonk said she has wasted an incredible amount of time trying to navigate the new system, including a four-month period during which she had no program specialist assigned to her at all.

“If taxpayers knew what this means to the most vulnerable children and families, I cannot believe that they wouldn’t say, ‘Enough is enough,’” she said.

Not all providers reported such stark changes and turmoil though: Just under 25% of respondents said their program had not experienced related impacts at all.

Wanda Minick, executive director of the Florida Head Start Association, said that in her nine years doing this work, “we’ve always had an issue with communication from our regional office, point blank. There has always been a delay in response.” While Florida’s regional office was spared during the closures, it still faces increased burdens since they’ve taken on additional states. Over the past year and a half, she said the delays have largely “stayed status quo.”

In all, the survey’s findings point to an already stressed system facing mounting hurdles and unpredictability, leaving providers and families unsure about the program’s future.

“It just feels like a huge, heavy blanket over the top of a program,” said Warren. “They’re constantly under this heavy weight of uncertainty and delay.”

In many cases, though, people are looking to move because they want to start or grow their families, said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin, a real estate brokerage &�Բ�����;— making the matter of childcare particularly relevant to their search. 

With housing and childcare for many families’ two biggest expenses — an intersection that Redfin explores in a —  leaders at Redfin have been looking for a way to bring childcare into their own platform for some time.��

Now, they’re debuting a new feature, in partnership with Winnie, a national online childcare marketplace, that gives families visibility into nearby early care and education programs right there on the property listing they’re viewing. 

“Searching for a home often coincides with having a child,” said Fairweather. “If you’re trying to do the calculation on how much house you can afford, it’s helpful to know what your childcare options are before committing to that mortgage.”

Beginning today, Winnie’s childcare data from more than 250,000 licensed early care and education programs nationwide is available on every for-sale property listing on Redfin’s mobile and desktop websites. The integration will be available on Redfin’s mobile application for iOS and Android by the end of September, said Isabelle Novak, a spokesperson for the real estate company. 

The childcare feature will live right alongside the K-12 feature from GreatSchools — a nonprofit that rates schools — that has been available on Redfin for over a decade, Novak added. Prospective buyers, scrolling down a property listing, will see a “K-12” option and a “Preschool & daycare” option.

The “Preschool & daycare” feature pulls the Winnie profiles of nearby providers — including licensed center-, home- and school-based early childhood programs — displaying up to five options along with the ages each program serves and its distance from the home. A buyer can click the name of a previewed program to see a pop-up that offers more details, including a provider’s website URL, hours of operation, description, address, options for financial assistance, language and any parent reviews that have been published to Winnie. 

For further information, buyers can click through to the provider’s profile on the Winnie website, which may have information like available slots and tuition rates, said Sara Mauskopf, CEO and co-founder of Winnie. Winnie pulls from public state licensing databases to create provider profiles on its site, Mauskopf said. From there, providers can update their pages with additional information. About a quarter of the 250,000 provider pages on Winnie have been claimed, Mauskopf added, and providers who are active on the Winnie platform will frequently update the number and type of open spaces they have in their program, since it can change “day-to-day.” 

Mauskopf believes this partnership will be very valuable to young families for whom “childcare is a necessity, not a nice-to-have,” she said. 

“I think it’s really critical for families to be thinking about childcare upfront and not as an afterthought,” she said.

Mauskopf, a mom of three, recalled that when she and her husband were trying to find a home in their area, their focus was on home prices, not care options. After they’d moved, they ended up “scrambling at the last minute to secure childcare,” even having to consider whether one of them would need to step away from work until they could find childcare for their kids. 

That’s as important for families moving to quiet rural areas as it is for those in large metro areas, she said. They will want to know if they have many options or few, and if those are within walking distance or require a drive. 

“One of the things we know is true is that there are sometimes areas where there is no childcare nearby — childcare deserts,” Mauskopf said, referencing often used to describe areas that lack access to licensed programs. “Those might actually be affordable places to live,” she added, but if care is sparse or unavailable, that could be a dealbreaker for some families. The new feature can help families see whether there are care options near the home they’re eyeing. 

Indeed, Novak at Redfin said that the childcare integration will only show providers within a 10-mile radius of the address. If there are none, a message will appear noting that no programs were found within that distance of the home. 

One detail that many families will be seeking is the cost of childcare in a given area. Unfortunately, Mauskopf said, a lot of early care and education programs still require families to tour the space before sharing prices, “which is crazy,” she said. “It’s unlike any market.” 

That may soon change, though. She has recently to a shift in the industry, in which providers are starting to post tuition information publicly — a change likely driven by the fact that families are asking AI about program rates, she noted. 

“A lot of providers, for the first time, are willing to list prices online, since AI will just give you an answer anyway,” Mauskopf said. 

A majority of programs are still requiring parents to come in first, she said, but there’s increasing willingness to share costs upfront. She hopes that shift will continue and can soon be reflected in the Redfin integration so families can have a complete picture of their costs before making a move.

With costs up, many are facing financial hardship at a level even greater than what was seen at the onset of the pandemic. That economic strain is taking a toll on the emotional well-being of children and their caregivers.

That’s according to that have asked families how they are faring. 

“It’s really clear that it’s a really difficult time to be a parent in America right now,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union. “I feel like we’re being squeezed in so many different ways.”

The administration’s approach to tariffs has forced up the price of many basic goods and services, she noted. The conflict in Iran has caused oil prices to spike. And federal legislation — namely H.R. 1, known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill” — has led to the beginning of a pullback of social safety net programs such as SNAP and Medicaid.��

As a result, Americans are dealing with soaring gas prices, increased grocery costs, higher utility bills, and untenable healthcare premiums that have prompted some to “roll the dice” and go uninsured, Rodrigues explained. On top of all of those ballooning expenses, parents must also weather the costs of childcare; extracurricular activities for the kids; and food, clothing and medical care for their dependents. 

“All of these things compound and create this context of misery that we’re all feeling pretty acutely this summer,” said Rodrigues, whose organization recently released the results of a of parents of more than 1,500 K-12 public school students. 

Among parents of children in kindergarten through fifth grade, NPU found that about two-thirds of respondents expressed that they think the economic conditions in the country are getting worse, with an overwhelming majority saying that the costs of housing, basic goods, healthcare, childcare and extracurricular activities were each “somewhat” or a “very big” problem right now. Three in four parents of kids in grades K-5 said inflation had changed their summer plans. Trips have been canceled or dialed back. Summer activities, such as camp, have had to be reconsidered. 

Magda Zalewska, a mother of three children under age 6 in Romeoville, Illinois, is one of the parents feeling immense financial pressure this year. She wants to sign up her two older children — ages 4 and 5 — for soccer, but it’s not something she can afford. Trips to the grocery store and fueling up her car are crushing her right now, she said. She has no money in a savings account in case of emergency; she’s always hoping her air conditioner doesn’t go out, that her car keeps running. 

“I’m already working from sun up to sun down,” said Zalewska, who works as an early intervention therapist. “I’m already stretched so thin, and it’s frustrating because you want to give your kids this life but you can’t keep up with expenses.”

Her compensation, even as it has gone up, never seems to keep pace with inflation, she added.

“Everything is going up in price,” she said. “I keep climbing the ladder, climbing the ladder, [but] I’m always at this paycheck-to-paycheck scenario, no matter how far I advance in my career.”

Zalewska has benefited from financial assistance over the years, from WIC, SNAP and Medicaid, but she said she lost Medicaid coverage recently and has been told she’s going to lose her SNAP benefits as well. Already, she said, she can’t remember the last time she ate fresh fruit. When SNAP is gone, she said, “It won’t be produce I’m not eating, it’s going to be meals I’m skipping.” (She focuses on making sure her three children have enough to eat before she feeds herself.)

“How am I supposed to pour into their cups when my cup is not filling?” she asked. “The support is being taken from our fingertips. It’s just all gone.”

Zalewska takes some comfort in the knowledge that she’s not alone. She notices a “uniform struggle” in the families she works with. “If it’s not financial, it’s overall stress and mental well-being. Most families are burnt out.”

Her point is reflected in data from Stanford’s RAPID Survey Project, which has been gathering information monthly from parents and childcare providers for over six years. Indeed, 44% of families with infants and toddlers reported challenges paying for basics such as food and housing in 2025, according to a by the nonprofit Zero to Three, which compiled RAPID data from families with children under age 3. That represents the highest rate in the prior five years of survey data, including in 2020 when 42% of families reported the same difficulties.

By the end of 2025, families’ financial hardship seemed to peak, said Samantha Melvin, director of policy research at Zero to Three and author of the report. 

“Their struggles really grew throughout the course of 2025,” she said. “We can’t say discretely that one thing changed, but there is this kind of cascading, consistent onslaught of uncertainty and distress.” 

Families specifically mentioned the heavy burdens of affording food, housing and utilities, she said. Economic pressure often affected emotional and mental well-being, with parents reporting increases in anxiety, depression, stress and loneliness over the course of the year. 

Those stressors affect not just adults, but entire families, Melvin noted. 

“If you’re afraid of paying for rent, putting food on the table, it may impact how you’re interacting with your baby or [how] your baby is perceiving that stress,” she said. “It can have long-term consequences and harm for babies to be living in this constant place of uncertainty and deprivation, unstable and inconsistent relationships.”

Often, people will respond to moments of hardship by noting that children are resilient. And they are, Melvin agreed. 

“Families and the relationships are what creates that resilience,” she clarified. “Babies are resilient because of their parents.”

So when parents are taking on extra jobs to cover expenses, waiting in line at a Medicaid or SNAP office to access benefits they are eligible for, or visiting food banks to make sure their kids can eat dinner, that inherently pulls them away from quality time with their children. “How do relationships get formed?” Melvin asked. “It’s with that time.”

This resonates for Zalewska. She’s been taking on more and more work to help her family’s finances. She estimates that she works about 65 hours a week. 

“I barely see my kids,” she said. “I’m missing all their milestones.”

Her current circumstances have left her in “fight or flight mode,” she said. Her nervous system is “haywire.”

“I’m exhausted,” she said. “I feel it in the bones of my body.”

Clara Busse, a mom in Philadelphia with an infant and a 3-year-old, doesn’t worry so much about meeting her basic needs, but she and her husband have to make some sacrifices to afford the annual cost of their childcare, which is around $35,000 for her two children, she said. 

“Every friend I have with young children is facing the same challenges,” Busse said. “We need policies that make sense for young families. It’s really basic stuff. People are really frustrated.”

These issues are not likely to improve in the near term, with major cuts to SNAP and Medicaid looming in early 2027. Rodrigues and Melvin both emphasized the need for policies that support families, rather than ones that continue to take programs away and make life with young children less affordable.��

“Families are having such a hard time,” Melvin said. “They shouldn’t have to be working so hard, but the way they keep showing up for their babies — we need our policymakers and elected officials to be showing up for them.”

The mismatch between the childcare arrangements parents say they prefer and those that public policy tends to emphasize — which I call the childcare preference gap — was reinforced by two recent surveys. 

A administered to 1,000 parents with children ages 5 and under in December 2025 by GBAO on behalf of Third Way — a center-left think tank — found that around half of parent participants preferred having a parent stay home to provide care, with another 15% preferring a family, friend or neighbor caregiver. While families were generally satisfied with the care their children were receiving, only around half of those using home- or center-based care said it was their preferred childcare arrangement, compared to 80% of those with a parent staying home and nearly 70% of those using FFN care.

The largest U.S. of parents with children under the age of 6, released in May by New America’s New Practice Lab, echoes these findings. When asked about their ideal childcare arrangement, 49% of nearly 5,500 parent participants said they’d prefer to care for their child themselves or for the child’s other parent to provide the care. Meanwhile, 11% preferred an FFN caregiver, and just 15% listed their ideal as a formal setting.

Surveys conducted earlier in the 2020s by and reported similar results. Importantly, these preferences are dynamic: As children age, there is more interest in formal programs, such as licensed childcare centers.

It’s important to consider that most of the polls described above asked parents to envision their ideal childcare scenario, setting aside costs and the financial impact of having a parent stay home. But families don’t live in hypotheticals. There are real financial implications for decisions about childcare, and when opportunities to access free or low-cost licensed early care and education arise — like universal pre-K or childcare — . What’s more, the strong preference for parental care in the first year of life seems to implicate a need for better paid leave policy as much as childcare policy, particularly since .

There’s also the reality that what people say they want to do in a survey can differ from what they actually do when making choices. However, the data can still be meaningful and should be considered when designing family and childcare policies. It is no more justified to ignore the desires of parents who prefer their children in licensed programs than those who prefer to provide the care themselves. 

Doing so can give policymakers a false impression that all parents need is access to any childcare slot, regardless of its characteristics. However, from the nonprofit Child Trends found that among the 622 families surveyed, 64% of those that used any form of nonparental childcare said there was moderate or high “misalignment” between their current care setup and their preferences and needs. That misalignment reflected parents using programs that didn’t fit their budget, align with their quality standards, reflect their beliefs or match their ideal setting. This discrepancy can actually cause material harm: Studies have found that when parents feel uncomfortable about their childcare arrangement, it may lead to . 

Yet current federal childcare policy, as well as most reform proposals over the past 20 years, do a rather poor job of reflecting parents’ stated preferences. While public policy does not always match public opinion (if it did, the U.S. would have, for example, and ), there is clearly room for improvement here. 

When it comes to childcare, for example, receive most of the funding from the Child Care and Development Fund, a federal program that sends grant money to states and is a key source of funding for childcare subsidies. Families with stay-at-home parents are categorically ineligible for childcare subsidies, and the most recent reauthorization of the law governing the program, the , made it harder for FFN providers . The Build Back Better Act that passed the House during the Biden Administration did not make any fundamental changes to that orientation.

To understand the persistent preference gap, one must understand the origins of modern U.S. childcare policy. Because childcare became , the conceptual underpinnings of the CCDBG Act are grounded in the premise that childcare assistance can increase employment and earnings, ultimately (the reasoning goes) enabling families to move out of poverty.

The appeal of such an approach is understandable: It’s far easier for policymakers to wrap their hands around licensed programs caring for children during parents’ reported work hours than to engage with the messy complexity of actually ensuring that parents have the care they prefer in order to bond with and healthily raise their very young children. Closing the preference gap, then, requires politicians on both sides of the aisle to reframe the goals of childcare policy — and to get more comfortable with trusting parents.

America’s current approach to childcare policy isn’t the only pathway. In the past, the U.S. actually did experiment with that allowed eligible low-income parents to use subsidy dollars to pay themselves, though such efforts never caught fire. Other countries have also built examples to look to. A recent from the People’s Policy Project highlighted how Nordic nations have built a childcare system that couples affordable licensed options with support for informal care. While the financial support available in the Nordic countries is unlikely to be high enough to enable a parent to stop working entirely, it could be the key to unlocking greater flexibility in balancing work and family responsibilities.

A shift does seem to be underway in America. Some policies are becoming more inclusive. New Mexico’s universal childcare system, for example, allows and receive $750 a month per child, though it does still exclude stay-at-home parents. Politicians are changing their tune, too: Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna that would create new structures to compensate FFN and stay-at-home parents alongside licensed programs, while the Democratically-aligned Project 2029 recently that would guarantee parents the right to choose the childcare that works best for them by offering access to either free licensed programs or a monthly stipend of $1,000 to compensate stay-at-home parents or FFN caregivers.

More and philanthropic leaders are also speaking up about the need to meet parents where they are at. For instance, the WeVision EarlyEd initiative, led by the Bainum Family Foundation, reimagining childcare policy to support two pathways for families: high-quality licensed ECE, and “trusted caregivers” which include parents and FFN caregivers.

This evolution can’t come fast enough: All families deserve the freedom to get as close as possible to their ideal childcare arrangement. That would benefit kids, parents and society writ large. The more that public policy can align with family childcare preferences, the better off the country will be.

Disclosure: The Bainum Foundation provides financial support to ����Ӱ��.

After the birth of her son, Rex, in 2019, Jasmin Almendarez realized childcare costs in central Texas were so high that returning to work no longer made economic sense. 

“I didn’t want to spend that much time away, pay all of that, and then get minimal time for my first baby.” But by the time Rex was 3, she noticed signs of a speech delay, so she decided it would be best to send him to an early learning program to increase his interactions with peers. She began researching local options and reached out to Pre-K 4 SA, a preschool not far from her home in San Antonio. 

She visited the program, which was in a brand new building with a spacious outdoor play area. The staff was friendly, she said, and meals were included. She didn’t think such an in-demand location would have an opening for Rex, but they did — and she was surprised to learn that he could attend at no cost to her. 

Pre-K 4 SA is a citywide early childhood education initiative that operates multiple preschools across San Antonio. Rex, like 80% of children enrolled in the program, qualified for a full scholarship.

After one year, Almendarez said she noticed improvements in his speech. Rex learned his letters and how to count, and even how to swim. When her second son, Raiden, turned 3, she enrolled him as well. Now, pregnant with her third child, she hopes to enroll the baby in the Pre-K 4 SA pilot program for infants and toddlers. She also hopes to put her degree in early childhood education to use and be hired as a teacher in the program. 

Like Almendarez, Mariana Rios was hesitant to send her daughter Emma to preschool. Her husband’s family is Salvadoran and believed young children should stay home with a parent or relative. But Rios and her husband were intrigued by the quality of education that Pre-K 4 SA offered and decided to enroll Emma in 2023. Because of the sliding-scale cost model, Emma’s tuition was only $128 per month. 

When Emma began kindergarten after two years at the preschool, Rios recalled her teacher saying she could spot the kids who had attended Pre-K 4 SA based on their exemplary behavioral and social skills. Her mother-in-law, once a vocal skeptic of preschool, now encourages other family members to talk to Rios about the benefits of the program.

From modest backing to broad support for early childhood 

Emma, Rex and Raiden are just three of more than 23,000 children who have gone through Pre-K 4 SA since the program began in 2013. The first two locations opened their doors to 4-year-olds shortly after San Antonio voters in 2012 to add a ⅛-cent city sales tax to fund early childhood programs. One-eight of a cent was the maximum increase the city could make, according to Texas law, which caps sales tax at .��

The sales tax revenue, which has steadily grown, has come to serve as a dedicated revenue source for the program’s five locations. At the time of its proposal, the tax was estimated to . In 2025, it brought in , the bulk of Pre-K 4 SA’s $61.2 million annual revenue. 

The path to building a designated funding source for early childhood education was complicated. The idea for Pre-K 4 SA came from then-Mayor Julián Castro, who created a , featuring prominent local business leaders, to address some of the issues plaguing San Antonio. Those included the city’s , its and . The city was also facing a : Young people were moving to Austin for college and then staying there. 

The task force came up with a plan to improve San Antonio: , and allocate a specified revenue source to do so. 

In March 2012, in his State of the City address, Castro to put a sales tax increase directed to Pre-K 4 SA on the ballot, but he wasn’t sure how it would go since any change to the sales tax .

In November 2012, many community members were unconvinced that 4-year-olds belonged in schools, said Sarah Baray, CEO of Pre-K 4 SA. “There were a lot of questions about whether the city belonged in education at all.” The plan faced opposition from some residents in the business community, from higher-income residents and even from leaders in local school districts, who viewed the city’s plan to establish pre-K centers as competition for their own publicly funded pre-K programs. 

“Texas is a state that doesn’t like to pay taxes,” said Baray. Ultimately a sales tax was the path of least resistance. 

“Property taxes tend to be highly visible and directly tied to household finances,” said Larrisa Wilkinson, deputy CEO of Pre-K 4 SA. “Sales taxes, although regressive, are smaller costs spread across many people in everyday purchases, so they’re less noticeable and less likely to trigger strong pushback,” she said. 

The 2012 measure passed with . Within a year, Pre-K 4 SA opened two centers. A year later,

By 2020, when the sales tax was up for renewal, the initiative had been underway for seven years and had . By that time, there was evidence of success. conducted by University of Texas at San Antonio found that by third grade, Pre-K 4 SA students had higher math and reading scores as compared to their peers. The most pronounced effects were for children from low-income families and those with limited English proficiency. A cost-benefit of Pre-K 4 SA found that families enrolled in its extended-day program earned an average of $240 more per week than families who did not participate. For many families in San Antonio, a city with one of the , those funds can make the difference between living in financial security or hovering close to the poverty line. 

These data points made going back to the community and asking for support easier the second time, said Paul Chapman, who had been the chief communications officer at the time and now serves as chief operating officer at Pre-K 4 SA. “We could communicate to the community the status of what they have invested in and how we are doing.” In 2020, the ballot measure .

Along the way, the program continued to grow, adding a fifth center in 2019, which opened in partnership with a local school district.

As part of its mission to improve the quality of childcare, the program also provides shared services, training and education for more than 90 childcare providers in San Antonio. In 2025, Pre-K 4 SA spent over of its annual revenue on grants for external childcare providers in San Antonio, which has helped neutralize some of their earlier opposition that had viewed the program as a competitor. 

While sales tax revenue can vary year to year, it has provided enough stability to continue expanding. One of its locations, South Education Center, opened a new building in August 2025, as part of a with HOLT Group, a large, local manufacturing company. HOLT paid to build the center, which expanded capacity to serve more families, and the intention is that Pre-K 4 SA will buy it back over time, said Tonda Brown, Pre-K 4 SA’s chief of schools.

Astonishing teacher retention in a field with high turnover

Pre-K 4 SA has made deep investments in its workforce: All teachers and support staff are city employees with benefits including health insurance, paid time off and a retirement plan. 

The average pay for the program’s lead teachers is between $71,743 and $90,396, well over the of $65,000, and some lead teachers with extensive experience make over $100,000, Brown said. (Nationally, preschool teachers have of $32,000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.) 

In April 2026, 324 teachers were offered a contract to return in 2026-27, Brown said. All but two submitted a letter of intent to return — an astonishing feat in the U.S. early care and education sector, which struggles with .

“What makes San Antonio different is quality,” Wilkinson said. “No program nationally does the comprehensive work that Pre-K 4 SA does,” she added, referring to the combination of direct services, family engagement and professional learning opportunities. In her experience, she said, many states and localities prioritize access to early care and education over quality. “If you do not have a quality program, what is the point? Mediocre programs can have negative impacts,” she said. 

As widespread budget cuts have strained the early care and education sector, some states and localities have been exploring how best to invest in early childhood programs. While some efforts have yielded progress — , and broadening — many have relied on a temporary windfall, such as federal relief aid or a one-time budget surplus. That can create long-term expectations for providers and families that become difficult to sustain once the funding expires.

San Antonio bucked that trend by identifying that a sales tax could offer a dedicated, protected revenue source to provide more stability and consistency for childcare programs.

“Funding innovation is happening on the local level,” Wilkinson said. “Communities are saying ‘we want this, we need this, we are not going to be able to rely on state funding on its own.’ ”

The sales tax used to fund early childhood in San Antonio will be up for a vote again in 2028, and Baray said she is “cautiously optimistic” for its passage. Baray has witnessed a shift in mindsets about 4-year-olds in preschool, with more families, like Rios’, realizing how beneficial such programs can be for young learners. It helps, Chapman said, that family engagement, especially in the Hispanic community, was such a large part of their program.

“It didn’t negate the role of family in early education. It brought it in,” said Chapman. “Our goal is that Pre-K 4 SA earns that place of inevitability in the mind of the community that we serve.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the ages served when the program launched and the opening date of the fifth center.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hicks said her husband had hoped to spend those days at home bonding with his son and helping her before returning to work, but life had other plans. After she gave birth, their son was admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit for ten days, which consumed all of his time and meant he had to return to work immediately after they brought their son home from the hospital. “It would have been so nice for him to experience our son, taking him home,” Hicks said. 

Instead, Hicks was “just completely alone” with a newborn while her husband was working, she said. “I was just in a daze.” Her memories of the time are clouded, she now thinks possibly by postpartum depression, which she believes would have been prevented if her husband had been able to take paid family leave to be with her and their son. His absence in those early days also set up a “weird imbalance” where Hicks felt she had to take on more than her share of parenting. That pattern, once established, can be hard to undo. Studies that, if fathers take parental leave, they are more involved in domestic work later on. Meanwhile, her husband lost out on spending time with their son when he was a newborn who changed daily. Given that such young babies sleep a lot during the day, Hicks distinctly remembers telling her husband to rush home from work while her son was awake. “I was like, ‘Hurry, his eyes are open,’” she said. “It’s those little moments he didn’t get to experience.”

Paid family leave “is something that you want to be there for your worst days and your best days,” Hicks added.

Hicks, who is now co-director of Freedom Virginia, a political advocacy organization, was part of an effort that has now ensured that future Virginia parents won’t have to experience what she and her husband went through. On April 22, Governor Abigail Spanberger legislation into law that makes Virginia the 15^th state to pass a paid family and medical leave program.

The program will start paying benefits in December 2028 and is expected to cover private-sector workers, according to the National Partnership for Women & Families. Eligible workers will receive of their average weekly wages up to a cap for up to 12 weeks a year to welcome a new child, care for a family member with a serious health condition, or recover from their own medical events. Employers will have to give them their jobs back when they return. 

“Millions of families across Virginia won’t have to choose between their paychecks and taking care of themselves or their loved ones or bonding with a new baby,” said Elizabeth Gedmark, vice president at A Better Balance, a nonprofit advocacy organization. “It’s a really strong program.”

Virginia’s statewide paid family and medical leave program is also the first to be passed by a Southern state, which advocates say could create more momentum for the policy nationwide. Spanberger called it a “historic step forward” in a after signing the law, saying, “Thanks to this landmark law, millions of Virginians will no longer be forced to give up their paycheck when they welcome a child, or when their loved one faces a serious illness.” 

“This is a really huge victory for families in Virginia, for the movement nationally, and for the whole region,” Gedmark said.

Advocates have been fighting to enact paid family leave in Virginia for about a decade, Hicks said. The coalition of organizations behind it was able to learn from the that had already passed bills. It also courted the support of small business owners who wanted to be able to offer such a benefit and compete with larger entities but couldn’t afford the overhead. Those business owners needed “a state program that evens the playing field against large corporations,” she said. There was also pressure to compete with Virginia’s neighbors: Lawmakers in Maryland a paid family leave bill in 2022, while Washington, D.C. has had a program since 2020.

But Hicks said momentum for paid family leave in Virginia “really picked up” about five years ago, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The crisis “showed us that social structure and social net that everyone needs,” she said. At the same time, younger candidates, especially women, started winning seats in the state legislature, bringing new perspectives and life experiences, Hicks said. Freedom Virginia intentionally supported candidates who said they would support paid family leave. Paid family leave legislation “got really close” to passage in the last two years, she said, but ran aground on opposition from former Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who bills that the general assembly had passed. “The support was there, and it was growing,” she said.

Then Spanberger, who has school-aged daughters, ran for governor to sign such legislation into law. “It’s been a really long time since we’ve had, not just a governor with school-aged children to understand what working families are going through, but someone who’s had the experience of motherhood and giving birth,” Hicks noted. Both Hicks and Gedmark said they think Spanberger’s vocal support for family leave helped her win. “It just goes to show, if you campaign on giving workers and their families concrete action that improves their lives and helps pocketbooks,” Gedmark said, “it’s a really good political strategy.” 

Both Hicks and Gedmark argued that it matters to have a state in the South enact paid family leave. Nearby states will “feel pressure to act,” Gedmark said, “because they’re competing for the same talented workforce, competing to try to draw in business.” It will also offer other Southern states a relatable example. They can no longer write off paid family leave as something only happening in coastal blue states like California and New York, Gedmark said. “There’s a similar culture, there are similar industries, even similar weather, which matters a lot,” she said. “In the South, they all want to keep up with the herd.” She expects to see more states in the region follow suit.

Gedmark also believes Virginia’s example will ripple across the country. Advocates in other states are already starting to talk to A Better Balance about replicating the state’s success, she said. 

She also thinks it will create momentum at the federal level. “As the saying goes, ‘As goes the South, so goes the nation,’” she said. First, there is the fact that Virginia is right next door to D.C. and many lawmakers’ staff live there. But there’s also the fact that Virginia will prove that this isn’t a policy that can only exist in deep blue states. “There is so much that can easily be dismissed if it seems to be sort of just a coastal elite thing,” she said. Now it “can no longer be dismissed.”

More recently, though, the preschool decided to establish protocols for another kind of emergency: the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the area. 

Ever since the start of the second Trump administration, when immigration enforcement activity across the country intensified, staff and families have experienced extreme stress and anxiety about the possibility of masked agents apprehending children at their own schools, said Leah Cates, executive director of Second Street Youth Center. (Previously, education settings like Second Street would’ve been protected from immigration raids under the so-called sensitive locations policy, but the administration that designation in January 2025.)  

Cates is glad she put that new lockdown protocol in place, she said, because they’ve had to activate it twice already. 

One of those times, a teacher heard a young boy at the school yell, “Pistola! Pistola!” — Spanish for “gun” — after he saw, through a window, an ICE agent with his weapon drawn, trying to detain someone on the street right outside the school.

“We had to pull our children off the playground, bring them in and immediately go into lockdown,” Cates said. 

Some children go on walks in the community with teachers throughout the day, she added. During lockdowns, the staff use radios to communicate about the presence of ICE and determine whether groups on walks should return to the school or go to a nearby church or the fire department to seek immediate shelter. 

Their fears are not unfounded. So far, five of the 210 children enrolled in the state-funded preschool, which serves ages 3 to 5, have experienced a parent or primary caregiver detained by ICE, said Cates, who is keeping track of the impact on her school community. Many other students have relatives who have been detained, deported or otherwise apprehended by the federal agents. More than 80% of the students are from immigrant families, she added, and most are from South and Central American countries. 

Second Street offers just one example of the terror echoing through homes and early childhood programs across the country, in red and blue states, in rural and urban communities, and in documented and undocumented families. 

Researchers at the Center for Law and Social Policy, a national, anti-poverty nonprofit, have been examining the impact this administration’s immigration agenda is having on young children and their caregivers.

Between June and December 2025, CLASP staff held focus groups with 56 “at-risk” immigrant parents and primary caregivers of 74 children ages 6 and under. They also interviewed nearly 70 individuals who provide services to these families&�Բ�����;— many of them as early care and education providers, but also some home visitors, health care workers and others. Their findings, which anonymize the participants, are detailed in a pair of reports — centered on the experiences of young children and their immigrant families, and focused on early care and education providers in their communities.

The interviews were conducted in seven states: Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Texas and Washington. In those states, immigrant families with young children range from 13% of the population in Michigan to 41% in New Jersey, according to from the Urban Institute, which combines from 2022 and 2023. Nationally, about 24% of children ages 5 and under have at least one immigrant parent. 

What emerged from the research is a clear picture of communities that are experiencing toxic stress and trauma, said Kaelin Rapport, policy analyst at CLASP and an author of both reports. 

“People are really scared, and they’re struggling immensely,” Rapport said. “Care providers are not feeling secure. Parents are struggling to feel safe themselves. Children are internalizing these stressors and these pressures.”

The concern that many immigrant adults feel, Rapport added, is preventing some of them from leaving their homes, whether it’s to go to the grocery store or to work. 

“It’s confining the entire family inside this emotional pressure cooker,” Rapport said.

Many parents attempt to shield their young children by avoiding conversations about immigration enforcement, yet their fears and anxieties still permeate the household.

“It was very clear that children are feeling the trickle-down effects of stress,” said Suma Setty, senior policy analyst for immigration and immigrant families at CLASP and an author of the two reports. 

During an interview, the director of a child care center near Dallas shared with Setty that, before 2025, children in the program used to be so curious about visitors who came to the center. Now, when they see new faces, they hide behind the teachers’ legs. “That’s been a marked change she has observed,” Setty said. 

Cates, who was interviewed for the CLASP reports and shared details about the experiences of her preschool community with ����Ӱ��, has seen the way information about immigration enforcement reaches children at Second Street — and how they respond. 

It’s a regular practice at the preschool for staff to ask children how they’re feeling each day, she shared. One day, a little girl said she was scared. Her teacher told her she is safe at Second Street. But the girl said, “No, ICE can get me,” then started to cry, Cates recalled. 

“The child knows,” she said. “They may not understand everything, but they know someone was taken in their families. They see the upset of parents, the upset of family members.”

Then, she added, they take what they learned and tell their friends. Cates and other staff have overheard children talking about ICE on the playground, she said. 

“We think we’re doing a great job of shielding children, but little children have big ears. They put their listening ears on, and they hear everything,” she said. “We’re not doing as good a job as we think. Those 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds are hearing, and being affected by, the trauma.”

In interviews for the CLASP report, Rapport said, several families and early care and education providers described children as “clingy” now. Some children who had been sleeping independently through the night are now insisting on sleeping in bed with their parents. Others, he heard, are less friendly, more emotionally reactive, more frightened of strangers and less adaptable to changes in routine. 

As for the caregiving staff he interviewed, Rapport said a word that comes to mind to describe their predicament is “desperation.” They are stressed and traumatized from the past 15 months too. They’re also depressed, burned out and dealing with compassion fatigue. 

“People who work in child care and early education do it because they love children and want children to succeed in life. They want children to have a healthy upbringing,” Rapport said. “They pour so much of themselves into that work. They’re pouring from that well, and sometimes that well runs dry … for themselves and their families.”

Most early care and education providers are underpaid, working in under-resourced programs, and in some cases are immigrants themselves or have immigrant family members to think of, the researchers said. Yet, as they write in the report focused on providers, “ECE service providers are being asked to do more than the work that they trained for; they are asked to be immigration law experts, administrative law experts, second parents, and even work for free.”

That certainly rings true at Second Street Youth Center. 

In addition to the new lockdown protocols, the preschool has made changes to other procedures. 

The program has implemented “very stringent rules” around access into the building. “If we don’t recognize who you are, we aren’t letting you into the first doorway,” Cates said. The maintenance staff, as part of their duties, now regularly walk a two-block radius around the building to scan for ICE activity. Families know to text school staff about any ICE activity they’ve seen or heard about in the area, and staff then distribute the message to all families so they can make alternative pick-up arrangements for their children. 

On top of that, Second Street has held events to educate parents about their rights. The school partnered with an immigration attorney who volunteered to help families make a plan for their children in the event something happens to them. 

The work is taking a toll on staff, she said, noting that staff are increasingly asking for a day off here and there because “it’s just all too much.” 

“But my staff … understand the No. 1 concern is the health, safety and well-being of children,” Cates emphasized. “Before we do anything else, our job is to keep children safe.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When she recently separated from her partner, it became critical that she get a job. She was hired for a position with a nonprofit last summer, and shortly after that, she went online and applied to get a subsidy so she could afford child care for her three children, ages 2, 4 and 8 years old.

Two months went by before she got a response, she said, only to be told that she had been put on a waitlist. It gave her “a moment of panic,” she recalled. “I need my bills to be paid but I also need somebody to watch my children.” There was no way she could afford the out-of-pocket cost of child care on her pay. It costs a year, on average, for center-based care for a toddler in Virginia.

A growing number of parents have been confronted recently with a situation similar to Moyer’s. Strapped for child care funding, have started waitlists for child care subsidies — or lengthened existing ones — putting new applicants in limbo when they need immediate help paying for care. Virginia is one of 14 states that have recently instituted or expanded waitlists, according to Child Care Aware of America. 

Moyer ended up asking neighbors and friends to watch her children, “people that I normally wouldn’t have asked to watch my kids,” she said. She installed some cameras in her house to make herself feel more secure. But “I wasn’t as comfortable as I would have been had they been in a licensed, insured day care,” she noted, adding that she had to work around the schedules of the people who agreed to watch her children, even though she wasn’t able to control her own schedule at work. There were some days when the person she had arranged to watch her kids canceled at the last minute, sending her scrambling to find someone else.

“It was very, very emotionally stressful, because I had never been away from my kids up until this moment and suddenly I’m leaving them at home with other people,” she recalled.

Moyer had to wait four months to get off Virginia’s waitlist, she said. Then, when she was finally taken off, she had to fill out all the paperwork again, which required getting documents from her employer and finding a child care center that she could enroll her children in. It took her another two weeks before she was actually getting help, she said. 

Waiting lists for child care subsidies are not new. “It has been true for a long time that there are not enough resources to provide subsidies to every eligible family,” said Anne Hedgepeth, senior vice president of policy & research at Child Care Aware of America. “We’re not meeting families’ needs with our current subsidy system.” In 2021, were eligible for subsidies under state rules, but just 1.8 million received them, or less than a quarter of those who qualified. 

But the child care sector has, in the past five years, received more funding that it typically does. It received in federal COVID relief funding meant to prop the sector up, which some states to eliminate waitlists, among other changes. The Child Care and Development Block Grant, which mostly funds state subsidies, received a increase in funding in 2023 and then another increase in 2024. Some states, for their part, also devoted some of their own dollars to the sector.

Now with the billions in COVID relief funding gone, and with big state budget cuts looming due to to Medicaid and other safety net programs passed by Republicans in Congress, many states have searched for ways to reduce spending. Waiting lists have become a common tool. States are “not able to serve all eligible families, and they’re having to do things like institute waitlists that limit families who are coming in,” Hedgepeth said. 

Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Dakota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia have recently started putting at least some parents on waiting lists for child care subsidies or have significantly expanded the number of parents on their lists, according to Child Care Aware of America. Missouri also   a waitlist starting March 1. 

The number of states with waitlists has nearly doubled since early 2022, according to Child Care Aware of America. “Many on this list did not have waitlists when there were additional dollars available,” Hedgepeth said, and “were able to serve all of the families that were applying.”

This situation “does tell us that the funding amount that was flowing to states during the pandemic was an amount that better reflected the total need in the system,” Hedgepeth said. The increase in states using waitlists as an approach to cut costs is bad on its own, but it’s also a canary in the coal mine, she said, signaling deeper troubles in the child care system.

“A single state may not be able to replace federal funding,” she noted, but if it’s only spending the bare minimum without dedicating general funds “that’s a real opportunity for state policymakers.” , for example, has instituted waitlists without investing any additional funding for the sector. 

For parents like Moyer, the impact of state waitlists can be devastating, Hedgepeth said. Many families don’t bother to go through the steps to get a subsidy or might not even know that they’re eligible in the first place. For those who actually fill out the paperwork and submit it, “which is often no easy task,” she said, finding out that they won’t get any help for a number of months or, possibly, indefinitely “can be really disheartening.” Parents likely face impossible choices about how to make sure their children are cared for while they work. “This is not something they have time to wait for,” she said. “They need care today for their kids.” That’s especially true for mothers, as women’s labor force participation has , and many parents child care problems are keeping them from work. 

Providers, meanwhile, often suffer as well. In Indiana, for instance, the freeze in new subsidies left some providers who were counting on enrolling new infants with empty infant classrooms. The freeze, along with deep reimbursement cuts, has put them in a difficult financial position. “Your highest rates of pay comes from your infants,” Dionne Miller, who runs Room to Bloom Learning Academy in Indianapolis, previously told ����Ӱ��. “We no longer have that stream of income coming in.” More than 100 providers closed last September and October after the state’s changes were put in place.

On top of the expiration of federal pandemic relief funds, ongoing federal funding has become increasingly unstable. In December, the Trump administration announced that, after resurfacing fraud allegations in Minnesota’s child care and other public programs, it was freezing all child care funding to the state and reinstituting a Defend the Spend requirement for the Child Care Development Fund, which provides key funding for state subsidies across the country. With the change, all states now have to provide justification, including receipts and photo evidence, in order to draw down the money that was already appropriated by Congress. 

The administration also sought to completely freeze CCDF and other federal funding to five states, although that action has been by a judge. And the administration rescinded Biden-era rules that paid child care providers in a more stable way. 

Given all of this, Hedgepeth said, “I would not be surprised to see more states institute waitlists.” 

“We are in some ways back to the pre-pandemic conversation of the way in which child care and early learning are situated in our priorities,” she added. It’s “not receiving the full support that it needs despite what we know about its critical importance to families and economies.”

Updated March 27, 2026: In response to this story, YouTube terminated six channels for violating the platform’s terms of service and one channel for violating its spam policy.

In a video that has been played almost 50,000 times since it was posted five months ago, two cartoon children sing along as they guide viewers through the experience of riding in a car amid a vividly colored, utopian backdrop. 

At first, the seems harmless. The song is upbeat and informative. The animation aligns with the promised subject. 

Except, hold on a second, did those lyrics just say, “Red means stop, and green means right”? And why are the characters changing in every frame — different hairstyles and colors, slightly different outfits for the girl and boy? 

Worst of all, for a video that purports to be “educational,” the visuals are sending precisely the wrong message about riding in a car. 

The video opens with the children riding, without seatbelts, in the front row of a moving vehicle. The next scene shows the girl defying physics, floating alongside a moving car, while the boy is seated in what appears to be the hood of the vehicle as it travels backward down a busy street. The third and fourth scenes show the children walking in the middle of the road with moving cars behind them. 

It’s not hard to imagine how the video could have gotten so many views. 

Maybe a parent needs to complete a task — fold some laundry, get dinner ready, hop in the shower — and is searching for an age-appropriate video on YouTube to entertain their toddler during that short time. Perhaps that toddler, increasingly independent and prone to running off, needs a better grasp of road safety. “Vroom Vroom! Car Ride Song | Educational Nursery Rhyme for Kids” presents itself as a win-win solution. 

But children’s media experts say this is AI-generated “slop,” and that it has infiltrated the internet, preying on young children and their unsuspecting caregivers. 

“We’re at the beginning of a monster problem, and we have to get hold of it quickly,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Temple University and senior fellow at Brookings Institution who studies child development. 

She and other researchers, including Dr. Dana Suskind, a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago, have that AI-derived products for babies and children need to be reined in. 

“This is not neutral content,” said Suskind, author of the forthcoming book . “I think of this as toddler AI misinformation at an industrial scale. It’s very risky for the developing brain.”

It’s hard to say just how pervasive this type of content is, but it’s clear the problem is widespread and getting worse. One published by video-editing company Kapwing in November 2025 found that about 21% of YouTube’s feed consists of low-quality, AI-generated videos. 

, the creator of the “Vroom Vroom! Car Ride Song,” has posted more than 10,000 videos since its first release just seven months ago, in August 2025. That’s an average of about 50 new videos each day. , meanwhile, has published about 3,900 videos to YouTube in its entire 20 years on the platform. 

The cognitive decline associated with the consumption of AI slop — such as a shortened attention span, decreased focus and mental fog — is sometimes referred to as “brainrot.” But when the audience is children, there’s not much to rot, Suskind said. Because a child’s brain is still in its early development, still being built, what you get instead, she said, is “brain stunt.”

“Every experience is building a million new neural connections,” Suskind said of children who are still in their early years. “You will be unintentionally wiring the brain in incorrect ways.”

That comes at a cost. A child may absorb the implicit messages of something like the Vroom Vroom video and end up mimicking the “downright dangerous” behaviors they saw depicted there, said Carla Engelbrecht, who has created digital experiences for children’s media brands such as Sesame Street, PBS Kids and Highlights for Children and considers herself an AI educator and creator.

Engelbrecht is also when it comes to child-targeted AI slop. She has found countless examples of AI-generated videos that could cause real physical harm.

“The more content I find,” she said, “the more horrified I get.”

They include videos of a being chased by a T-Rex; a crawling biting into an apple that appears bloody, swallowing whole grapes (a major) and eating honey (which carries the potentially fatal risk of ); and a eating raw elderberries (which are toxic when uncooked).

But there’s another category of AI slop in kids’ media, she said, with consequences that are more difficult to capture. These videos claim to pertain to learning and development, focusing on topics like literacy and numeracy, but due to the speed with which they are produced and the lack of quality checks, they end up introducing or enforcing the wrong lessons. And sometimes, the errors don’t come until midway through the content. That means if a parent previews the first few seconds of a video, they may miss the unreliable information that appears later in the clip.

A about vowels includes visuals of consonants. It also depicts letters on screen that don’t align with the audio overlay. A promising to teach about the 50 U.S. states sings along as butchered state names appear in text at the bottom of the screen — Ribio Island, Conmecticut, Oklolodia, Louggisslia. A about the seven continents frequently shows a compass with more than four points and indecipherable symbols where the “N,” “S,” “E” and “W” should be.

These may seem like silly slips from a machine, but for a child, every “input” is part of their learning process, Engelbrecht explained. “Mixed signals means you are delaying them learning the cause and effect of a thing,” she said. “If you learn that red is blue and blue is red, that’s a delay.”

“If you’re inconsistent, it takes that much longer to learn,” she added. “Every delay they have means everything else gets pushed back. That’s taking their executive function offline to go learn nonsense.”

Amid all of this internet muck, the question of responsibility is a tricky one.

“Fundamentally, everybody has a responsibility,” Engelbrecht said, including platforms like YouTube; companies that operate large-language models, like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic; the people creating and publishing these poor-quality videos intended to reach kids; and parents. 

YouTube’s current requires creators to disclose videos that have been generated by or altered with AI when that content “seems realistic.” This does not apply to cartoons and — which seems to be the majority of what’s reaching children — because it has long been assumed to be fictional content, Engelbrecht explained. 

The platform does have stricter “” for content targeting children than it does for its general viewership, said Boot Bullwinkle, a YouTube spokesperson, in a statement. It also has a “.” (These web pages, however, do not specifically address the use of AI.)

Due to the volume of content on the platform, YouTube does not catch every video that violates its policies. (It did take action against at least seven channels on the platform in response to ����Ӱ��’s reporting, including terminating two.) 

“The trust that parents and families put in YouTube is a responsibility we take very seriously, and we’ve invested deeply in age-appropriate environments that empower parents,” Bullwinkle wrote in the statement. “YouTube Kids, for instance, offers industry-leading parental controls and rigorous designed to provide a safer experience for families.”

YouTube Kids is a distinct version of the platform with content that has been curated for children from birth to 12. Many families continue to use the main YouTube platform to view children’s content, though, which means many creators still have an audience and earning opportunities there. None of the AI-generated videos reviewed for this story were found on YouTube Kids, although recent in The New York Times found AI videos had penetrated that space as well.

Sierra Boone, executive producer of Boone Productions, a children’s media production company that makes original content for children ages 2 to 6, noted that kid-friendly competitors to YouTube, such as by Common Sense Media and , do exist. But they have struggled to break through to families. 

“Overcoming that juggernaut is extremely difficult,” Engelbrecht said of YouTube. “There’s a graveyard full of failed attempts to create a safe YouTube alternative.”

Boone suggested that some effective labeling would go a long way, not unlike the “” LinkedIn is phasing in, which aim to disclose when media has been created or edited by AI, in part or in whole. 

Engelbrecht thinks labels are a good idea, not least because they would be important for AI literacy, but she also believes they would penalize creators like her who use AI “thoughtfully” in their work. (She is , among other projects, an AI tool that detects AI slop in children’s videos on YouTube.)

As for who’s behind the videos, some of it originates overseas, but plenty is home-grown, created by Americans with access to phones or computers who are just trying to “make a quick buck,” as Boone put it. 

These people are often using AI at every step of the process — to develop themes and scripts for children’s videos, to generate the videos, and to automate the process of publishing the content regularly on “, in which the creator is anonymous and has no on-camera presence, Engelbrecht explained.

A little over a year ago, a popular content creator posted a video to YouTube in which she raves about a “huge opportunity” that would lead to “many millionaires.” The opportunity? AI-generated animated videos that inexperienced users could create with a simple prompt in just minutes. The target audience? Young children. 

That video has been viewed more than 335,000 times. 

“AI in general isn’t inherently good or bad, but it exposes people’s intentions,” said Boone, whose production studio is responsible for . 

The flood of AI-generated content, she added, reveals how many people have “no regard for children or how they’re impacted,” as long as it benefits them. 

For Boone, who works painstakingly with her team on every episode of The Naptime Show — researching, writing the script, editing the script, placing props, doing table reads, going to set, filming, editing the video, publishing and promoting the final product — creating children’s media is an “honor” that should be taken seriously. 

“The very foundation of creating children’s media is you are creating something that a child, in their core developmental years, is going to be consuming,” Boone said. “So what is the level of intention that you’re bringing to that? I think we need to be holding the people who are uploading this content more accountable.”

Ultimately, though, in the absence of more regulation or content moderation, the burden falls on parents. 

Parents are likely putting YouTube videos in front of their children in the first place because “they are already so stretched,” said Suskind, who still sees patients in her pediatric practice and interacts with families often. So it’s inherently challenging to ask them to more closely monitor the content that is coming through their children’s screens. 

Yet that is what must be done, Hirsh-Pasek said. Until a better solution emerges, the onus is on parents to separate the slop from “the good stuff.”

“We owe it to our kids to protect them,” said Hirsh-Pasek. “That’s what they look to parents for, to keep them in safe spaces. If we don’t deal with that or do anything about that, we’ve absconded [from] our responsibility.”

McNally, a Democratic state representative who lives in west Youngstown, Ohio, relies on her neighbors — who include nurses, police officers and public utility workers — as her North Star for how families are doing. These are people, she describes as having “job titles where they should be able to sustain a family and a household, but aren’t even coming close.” She hears how they are struggling to pay bills, how they can’t afford back-to-school supplies for their kids, or how long they will wait to turn the air conditioners on at their houses in the summer. 

that  most families spent their expanded 2021 child tax credit for everyday necessities: groceries, utilities, housing and clothing — the very same things she, her husband and neighbors were doing. The extra payment, between $3,000 and $3,600 annually per child — or a monthly check between $250 and $300 — brought the child poverty rate to a record low of 5.2%, . also shows that the funds dramatically improved overall well-being for families, many of whom were able to use the money to pay down bills or give a bit of breathing room to their finances. supports its bipartisan appeal. 

After the federal tax credit expired at the end of 2021, McNally introduced the in 2023, a measure she has since re-introduced in each session of the Ohio General Assembly since. A version of her proposal even made it into , before being overridden by the Republican’s veto-proof majority in the statehouse. 

McNally wasn’t the only lawmaker to view the child tax credit as a vehicle for families with young children to improve outcomes — and Ohio wasn’t the only state to take that approach. Altogether, 22 states and D.C. have created , though only child tax credits will be active in 2026. 

“States were curious about how to fill the gaps left behind,” said Ryan Vinh, a research analyst at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, who has studied the impact of the child tax credit.

by the Columbia center found that the state-level child tax credits helped mitigate the loss of the expanded federal credit. And the center’s forthcoming research, Vinh said, shows that the states that have expanded their child tax credits are seeing similar effects with bringing people out of poverty, but not to the extent the federal government’s impact was, largely because states are not able to offer the full amount of $3,000 to $3,600 per child. 

In July 2025, the federal , from $2,000 to $2,200 per child, although the new version limited the ability to receive a refund and created new eligibility criteria so that some families who were previously able to access the credit no longer could. Refundability is particularly crucial for the families in poverty, as it requires a family to make enough income to have a sufficiently high tax burden, rather than being able to access the funding outright. 

The ability to zero-in on child poverty is incredibly effective for state lawmakers who see this as an issue to address, and it’s drawing the attention of other states who are seeing the impact.

“It’s a domino effect,” said Neva Butkus, a senior analyst who leads the state child tax credit work for the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. States and localities seeking to add or expand a child tax credit work with her team to come up with what they want to solve for — in some cases it may be reducing the number of families in poverty, or it might be creating a smaller tax credit that more families can access, improving overall affordability. 

Butkus observed that there are clusters of states that tend to follow one another, such as those based on geography, and that conversations surrounding the child tax credit (CTC) among state lawmakers transcend political affiliation. She points to the CTC that McNally and DeWine pushed for and one that as examples of forward momentum in red and purple states. “We are seeing it become more commonplace, and lawmakers across the aisle are seeing the value in the credits, as affordability becomes more of a focus.”

The CTC is “both an affordability and anti-poverty mechanism,” Butkus said. “Lawmakers understand the rising costs associated with raising children. With recent years, lawmakers and advocacy groups come to us with poverty alleviation really as a focus,” she said. But addressing refundability tends to be one of the differences along party lines, she noted, as some legislators view fully refundable tax credits to be an anti-work incentive.

Vinh points out that there is not strong evidence that the fully refundable child tax credit negatively impacted workforce participation, and on the 2021 expanded tax credit found a “muted” impact on employment.

But there are limits to what states can do to address poverty. They are required to balance their budgets and cannot run a deficit — unlike the federal government — and cannot do deficit financing. “With the upcoming changes to Medicaid and SNAP, states have to take on additional cost sharing,” Vinh said. “To the extent that states have to find money in their budget, these kinds of gaps at the federal level create some concern about being able to fund more ambitious tax credit policies.” 

States that do opt for a generous child tax credit may see its impact relatively quickly. Butkus cites Minnesota as an example, explaining that in 2023, the state legislature used a budget surplus to  implement a child tax credit of $1,750 per child; in 2024 this was offered as an , a similar model to the checks in the mail that families received in 2021. from the Columbia center cite that this change will cut child poverty by one-third.

In neighboring Iowa, though, the legislature opted for a described as “a total windfall to the state’s of households.”

Ohio, too, opted to go in a different direction, despite having a Republican governor who championed the proposed child tax credit. In 2025, the child tax credit was nixed, but the state for the Cleveland Browns to build a new stadium. The state also switched to a , which, like Iowa’s changes, lowered taxes for the wealthiest residents..

McNally plans to keep pushing for the expanded child tax credit in Ohio, though she is aware that the outcome of the 2026 governor election will likely foretell whether she can gain momentum. Part of what she wants to do is continue selling it to families, who tend to tune out conversations about taxes. 

“Taxes are complicated, dry and dull,” she said. “But when I say ‘remember when you got the check in the mail, once a month from the federal government? You want to do that again?’ They said ‘oh that is awesome.’ They just want to get that money in the mail so they can buy groceries. They don’t care what is happening behind the scenes to get that.”

In fiscal year 2025, 1.59% of all federal spending was dedicated to supporting children from birth to age 3, down about 20% from its peak of 1.98% in 2021, when adjusted for inflation. 

That’s according to , an annual report from First Focus on Children, a nonprofit, bipartisan advocacy organization that seeks to elevate children and families in federal policy and budget decisions. 

For the 2025 edition, the authors tracked nearly 150 federal programs that invest in infants and toddlers, including mandatory programs such as Medicaid and SNAP and discretionary programs such as the Child Care and Development Fund, Head Start and Preschool Development Grants. Their findings, they said, confirm that the U.S. can and should be doing a lot better when it comes to babies.

And with major funding cuts to Medicaid and SNAP looming — programs which help to meet the basic needs of America’s youngest population and make up about half of all federal spending on babies — the next few years are only expected to be worse. 

“All the research shows this is the best investment you can possibly make for any age group, and yet we shortchange it,” said Bruce Lesley, president of First Focus and one of the report’s authors. “We make far fewer investments for kids — but particularly babies and toddlers — than we actually should be making.”

Is there a magic number of dollars to invest in young children? In an interview, Lesley and his co-authors said no. But they did note that while the world’s largest economy spends $1.59 out of every $100 on babies, it spends about $13 on defense.

Lesley also pointed out that children from birth to age 3 make up about of the U.S. population, meaning federal spending on them is not even half of their population share. And some would argue that infants and toddlers, being an especially vulnerable, wholly dependent group, warrant more than their fair share of spending. 

“Many things about human infants and toddlers are expensive,” said Elizabeth Gaines, founder and CEO of Children’s Funding Project, a nonprofit that works with states, communities and Native nations to support and expand funding for children. “They’re vulnerable creatures. We should be spending more of our resources on the most vulnerable of us.”

Many countries have better infrastructure for supporting children and families than the U.S. does, said Melissa Boteach, chief policy officer at Zero to Three, a national nonprofit advocating for infants and toddlers. Most have paid family and medical leave and universal health care systems, which the United States does not provide. That leaves many populations, including the youngest, to fend for themselves. 

“It’s paltry,” Boteach said of federal investment. “Babies are 100% of the future. They’re in a period where their brain development is so rapid, the investments have such a long-term impact, and yet we continue to underinvest in babies.”

While overall spending on babies is down about 20% over the past four years, discretionary spending has fared even worse. Since 2021, investment in programs that support child care, early learning, environmental safety and health for babies has declined by more than half — from 2.05% in 2021 to 0.96% in 2025. 

Many of these programs received historic levels of funding in 2021 as part of the , in response to the pandemic, making it an outlier year, acknowledged Chris Becker, vice president of budget policy and data analysis at First Focus and an author of the report. As a result of all that spending, he said, the child poverty rate in the U.S. was , lifting nearly 3 million children out of poverty and illustrating what could be possible if the nation invested more in its youngest citizens. 

“Child poverty exists. Food insecurity exists for babies. Homelessness exists for babies,” Becker said. “I don’t know what number solves that, but it is solvable.”

H.R. 1, also referred to as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which was signed into law by President Donald Trump in July 2025, may only increase the child poverty rate in the country, the authors of the Babies in the Budget report said. The legislation includes an estimated $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, which will gut the largest sources of federal spending on children from birth to 3. It will then be up to individual states to decide whether to make up the cost difference in those programs or let benefits lapse.

Trump has cast himself as a “” president, promoting rhetoric about boosting birth rates and supporting parents — a message by Vice President JD Vance and other allies. But the legislation tells a different story: Federal investment in babies and toddlers remains limited, and the largest funding streams for young children face steep cuts.

“I don’t even like to think about what is going to come from SNAP and Medicaid cuts,” said Gaines of Children’s Funding Project. “Kids in states that step up may end up being OK. Kids from states that largely voted this administration into office may not be OK.”

The president’s — though not in any way binding and merely used as a blueprint so Congress can see what the administration wants to prioritize — included program and funding cuts across the board, said Becker of First Focus. But “babies are hit especially hard,” he said, with proposed elimination of dozens of programs serving babies and a reduction of more than $2.5 billion in discretionary spending.

There is a dichotomy between the administration’s words and actions on children and families, added Boteach. 

“Budgets are moral documents,” she said. “Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what your priorities are. You can say your priorities are whatever you want, but the words are empty if they’re not reflected back in a document that actually puts resources into what you say your priorities are.”

Some leaders in the Trump administration have argued these programs for children are too costly, but Gaines doesn’t accept that as an answer.

“The resources are there. This is a nation of abundance,” said Gaines. “When people say the money is not there — it clearly is. Choices are being made about where we invest our dollars publicly.”

To illustrate her point, she noted that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act included a expansion of immigrant detention facilities. In 2021, the federal government spent on child care relief, and it was transformative for the field, she said. 

“I think if we asked the public whether they want their money on ICE detention centers or child care centers,” Gaines added, “they’d say child care centers.”

A third of American workers now have access to some form of government-issued paid leave — the biggest share ever. 

The United States is one of only a handful of countries that doesn’t have a federal paid leave policy offering workers paid time off after the birth of a child or to seek medical care, for example, and access to unpaid leave is only about . In that dearth of federal action, states have moved ahead to pass since 2002, which now cover a third of the population. Ten of those were passed in the past decade, as support for paid leave ; three go into effect this year.

Some states’ paid family and medical leave programs expand beyond time off to care for a new baby or to get medical treatment. Last year, Colorado expanded its paid leave program to include an for parents of babies in the neonatal intensive care unit. In Oregon, also qualify for paid leave. Connecticut offers paid leave if you’re serving as an .

According to research from the National Partnership for Women & Families, a nonprofit advocacy group, the 14 laws now cover 32 percent of private-sector workers, an estimated 46 million people. Of those covered, a third are women, a third are men and another third are parents. Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders have especially benefited — 55 percent have paid leave through their state programs, as do 41 percent of Latinx workers due to a concentration of these communities in states that have enacted programs. 

Paid leave laws are in 13 blue states and the District of Columbia: California, New Jersey, Rhode Island, New York, Washington, Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, Oregon, Colorado, Maryland, Delaware and Minnesota.

Though other workers may receive paid leave from their employers, workers of color — and especially women of color — are less likely to be in jobs that offer any paid leave. That’s one of the reasons advocates have pointed to a state or federal system as an equalizer that could improve access. 

“All workers will at some point need paid leave, whether for their own health or to care for loved ones. But when access is not guaranteed, the workers least likely to have paid leave also tend to be those who are likely to face greater health and caregiving challenges and have fewer financial resources to fall back on,” the National Partnership for Women & Families noted in its report. 

Low-wage workers, , have to paid family and medical leave from their employers than do high-wage workers.

“This creates a double bind for low-wage workers who often can’t take off unpaid time because they lack savings or might lose their job if they do. This inequity especially impacts women who are more likely to be low-wage workers and at the same time do two-thirds of unpaid caregiving,” said Katherine Gallagher Robbins, a senior fellow at the National Partnership for Women & Families and one of the authors of the report. 

Large paid leave campaigns in six more states — Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Virginia — could, if passed, bring the share of American workers covered to 44 percent, the national partnership estimated.

The most imminent of those is a proposal in Virginia. Last month, lawmakers in the Virginia House and Senate that are likely to be signed by Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who called for passing a state program in her State of the Commonwealth speech this year. 

In Pennsylvania, lawmakers are hoping to reignite momentum behind a paid leave bill that has support. Lawmakers in and are also considering a bill this session. And both Nevada and New Mexico have come close: In Nevada, a paid leave bill passed in the legislature last year was by Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo and in New Mexico, a paid leave bill passed the House last year .

At the federal level, part of the momentum of the past decade has come from men — — pushing for more paid leave access. During the Biden administration, the United States got to passing a federal paid leave policy before it was removed from a spending bill. Now during the Trump administration, lawmakers made permanent a who voluntarily offer paid leave to certain employees. 

So while the issue does have bipartisan support, Republicans and Democrats remain at odds about what form a federal paid leave policy should take. At a , U.S. Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, a Pennsylvania Republican who has a newborn, said his wife is able to care for their daughter because of her company’s paid leave policy. 

“We know that this practice makes an important difference for many in our community. Unfortunately, paid family leave has been out of reach for millions of Americans who are hoping to grow their families,” he said. 

But while state bills are “encouraging,” Mackenzie said it is also “difficult for state administrators and private-sector benefits managers to navigate the patchwork of paid leave policies across different states. While one program may work in Maryland, Alabama likely has its own workforce challenges to manage. One state’s approach should not be forced upon another’s workforce, or vice versa.” 

For paid leave, he said, “there is no silver bullet solution.” 

Dawn Huckelbridge, the director of Paid Leave for All, a national advocacy organization pushing for federal paid family and medical leave, said she is “heartened to see there is bipartisan interest and dialogue” on the subject. 

But, she added, “there are states that will likely never pass paid leave, so as long as there isn’t a federal guarantee, this is going to create a system and have and have nots that will just continue to grow inequities.”

was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of . .

Could those two trends be related? New research and surveys indicate yes.

In , Boston University economics Ph.D. candidate Abigail Dow finds that when child care prices increase, some American families decide to put off having more children, and many don’t have more children at all. 

Dow looked at child care prices across the country in a compiled and published by the Women’s Bureau at the Department of Labor with data from 2010 to 2022. 

She then isolated a “shock” to child care prices — an event, unrelated to something like a recession or a spike in inflation, that made the cost of care go either up or down. The shock she identified was that when states mandate smaller group sizes and/or lower child to staff ratios, child care prices rise, so she studied what happened to fertility decisions when states passed such regulations.

“My key takeaway is that child care costs are high in the U.S., and I do find they’re a barrier to having children,” Dow said. She found that a 10% increase in the price of child care for children from birth to 2 years old led to a 5.7% decrease in the birth rate among women aged 20 to 44. Her research also found that the price increase leads to women delaying when they have children: a 10% increase prompts women to push back their first birth by four months and to extend the time between a first and second child by half a month. Dow found that women’s decisions about whether to have second and third children were particularly hampered by high child care prices. 

The findings are strongest for women ages 30 or older. This is, Dow posits, because they have more to lose if they can’t get child care: they’ve invested more time and resources into their careers and likely earn more, making the cost of having to give up on work to care for more children in the absence of affordable child care higher. Younger women have less to lose by having a child and dropping out of the work force if child care can’t be secured.

The research is novel: while there have been studies in European countries which suggest that women rethink having children when child care prices rise, Dow knew that those situations may not be applicable to the U.S., where the government spends much less on child care, it’s a primarily private system, and there is no guarantee of paid family leave. “There wasn’t a robust empirical analysis of: How do child care prices affect fertility rates?” Dow said. 

Dow noted that child care prices aren’t the only factor dampening the country’s fertility rate — other research has found that things like housing and health care prices also make an impact. But it’s clear that the cost of raising children is top of mind for American parents when they’re thinking about the sizes of their families. In of 3,000 nationally representative respondents by YouGov, the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University, and Deseret News released in November, a record share of participants — 71% — said that raising children is unaffordable, a 13 percentage point increase over 2024. That high cost of raising children was listed as the single most important reason survey respondents offered for why they’ve limited the children they either had or planned to have. That response was twice as prevalent as the next two reasons they gave — a lack of personal desire and a lack of a supportive partner — and for the first time in the survey’s 10-year history, it was the top reason respondents gave.

The survey also found that support for government resources aimed at parents through direct payments and better programs had increased since 2021, and opposition to such interventions was 10 percentage points lower. A majority favor universal day care, while just 18% oppose it. Survey respondents also supported increased tax credits for parents.

“If you think about, ‘What do I have to think about when I’m raising a family for those early years,’ child care is going to be front of mind,” Dow said.

The situation is poised to get worse for Americans considering whether and when to have children. Dow’s data only goes through 2022. Since then, the billions of dollars in pandemic-era federal relief for the child care sector has disappeared. In its wake, states like Arkansas and Indiana have cut back on support for the sector. Indiana stopped enrolling new children in its child care subsidy program, and the state has reduced reimbursement rates for providers, leading more than 100 providers to shutter. Arkansas has also cut provider reimbursement rates, put new subsidy applicants on a waitlist, and instituted new copays for parents who receive vouchers. More of the cost burden will now fall on parents in states that pull back.

Dow cautioned that her research shouldn’t be interpreted as an argument for relaxing regulations in order to bring child care costs down and boost births. “These regulations are really important for child health and safety,” she pointed out. “I’m absolutely not in the business of saying we should be making these regulations more lax purely to make child care more affordable for parents.” But, she said, her research makes it clear that parents, and particularly mothers, make decisions about whether to have children and how many to have based at least in part on whether they can afford child care. “Anything we can do to make child care more affordable seems important from a policy perspective,” she said. 

“We know what the causes were,” said Leslie Boissiere, vice president of external affairs with the Casey Foundation, known for its , which evaluates child well-being and other measures in each state. “There were significant pandemic-era policies in place, notably, the Child Tax Credit, which was allowed to lapse. Rising costs have also had a significant impact,” she said. are also a factor. Families with workers in low-paying jobs are particularly vulnerable in the current economic conditions.

To make matters worse, cuts to Medicaid, the and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) , said Bruce Lesley, president of First Focus Children.

“Children 0 to 3 years old,” Lesley added, “have the highest poverty rate of any age group.”

Measuring child poverty doesn’t involve checking children’s tax returns or bank accounts. Little kids don’t have those. It depends entirely on the financial circumstances of their household, and often their parents. The Casey Foundation, and most other institutions tracking child poverty use the , which counts government benefits to gain a broader view of well-being, rather than the , which relies principally on wages. 

Poverty has serious consequences for learning. “In this period when a young child’s brain is in a rapid period of development, poverty is an impediment to that development,” Boissiere explained. “It increases the risk of behavioral and emotional challenges both at home and in school. And it creates a long-term barrier to a child’s ability to reach their full potential.” 

She elaborated: “If you think of what poverty means for a child, it means I’m constantly worried that I’m going to have enough food to eat. I’m not sure where my next meal is coming from. I may not live in healthy housing conditions. And it’s difficult for a child to focus when those things are on their minds.”

Over the long term, she noted, “There’s a direct impact on the children, but there’s also a direct impact on communities, and ultimately there’s a direct impact on the long-term health of our economy, because children today are the workforce tomorrow.”

Against this troubling backdrop, three pathways have emerged in the fight against child poverty — though none alone can fill the gap left by federal cuts.

States Taking Action

“The federal government sets the policies,” explained Boissiere. “And states implement those policies. And so the implementation can have a direct effect on how kids and families are impacted.” She noted that states can also pass their own child tax credits and earned income tax credits. In New Mexico, for example, anti-poverty programs and policies like reduced child poverty by 19 percentage points between 2022 and 2024, according to the Casey Foundation.

Maryland is pioneering another way that states can help their youngest residents thrive with its . The program provides grants to community partners in regions throughout the state where child poverty rates are especially high. 

The initiative has $19 million in grant funding to 28 high-poverty communities in 12 counties. Two strategies make ENOUGH unique: intentionally listening to community organizations and allowing them to “quarterback” the efforts; and harnessing philanthropic capital through the which is boosting the public funds, with $100 million committed for the next six years.

The investments include high-quality child care and education programs in South End, a community in , and , a cross-sector partnership in south Baltimore aimed to bolster education, community wellness, housing and economic health. as “a promising example for how other states can work across silos, enact evidence-based policies, and partner with local communities to reduce child poverty.

Gov. Wes Moore acknowledged the policy headwinds at a recent event kicking off ENOUGH’s second year, in which residents, officials and nonprofit leaders gathered in Baltimore’s Waverly neighborhood to hear about the initiative’s progress. Moore condemned recent federal budget cuts as “the single largest rollback of poverty-fighting programs in modern history.” 

He continued: “Now, at a time when the federal government is effectively telling communities of color and children living in poverty, ‘You’re on your own,’ Maryland is stepping up and doubling down. ENOUGH is about making government work better for the people it serves and ensuring that Maryland’s decade is written by our communities, not simply for them.”

Addressing a group of reporters after his remarks at the event, Moore recalled his service as CEO of New York’s Robin Hood Foundation. “I ran one of the largest data-driven poverty-fighting organizations in the country. We led with data, and that’s really the same type of mantra that we have here.” 

Philanthropy Filling Gaps

Like state and city governments, foundations and philanthropists can play a role in reducing the harm caused by cuts to programs that support working families, but cannot make up for the gaps in federal funding. There are a number of prominent grantmakers focused on child poverty, including the William T. Grant Foundation, the Ballmer Group, W.K. Kellogg Foundation — and their efforts to address a range of issues including early education, child welfare, racial equity, housing and family economic security make a difference. Giving USA, which tracks charitable giving, that nearly $180 billion of the $592.5 billion donated in 2024 went to human services and education. Much of that went to organizations helping children in the United States, though the categories extend beyond this population.

Reflecting on the present moment, Boissiere described the Casey Foundation’s approach: “We do our part to support the ecosystem, both in terms of supporting local organizations, but also making sure that public resources are available and that decision makers have access to data to try to help inform smart choices on behalf of kids.” 

Even if donors step up their giving significantly, nobody expects the generosity to come close to making up for — not even the recently announced from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. The gift is designed to put $250 into the so-called Trump accounts of 25 million children living in ZIP codes where the median family income is below $150,000. Because account holders cannot make withdrawals from the accounts until they are 18, however, the program does not directly influence the child poverty rate today.

Advocates Pushing for Change

The nationwide advocacy community — which also includes organizations like the , , , , the — isn’t giving up on pushing for the federal programs that have been proven to lift families and children out of poverty.

Recommendations from the include rental assistance to reach more people who struggle to afford housing and expanding the Child Tax Credit for the who don’t get the full credit because their families’ incomes are too low.

To this list, Lesley from First Focus adds making SNAP more generous for families with young children, when parents may be earning less because they are . He also said administered by Social Security for children who have experienced the death of a parent should be automatic, rather than requiring an application process.

In a , Lesley argued that advocates should prioritize children over families. The family-first frame, he writes, “has ignored the power of empathy and the perceived deservingness of children, muted the moral urgency of our arguments and made children invisible in policy discussions. It arguably has led to fewer resources for children and families alike.” Pointing to a , Lesley underscored that children are a winning issue with voters.

Real changes result from states directing resources toward solutions, foundations increasing their grantmaking, and advocacy organizations analyzing data and taking steps to build awareness or prompt policy change. But that may not be enough to support the sustained structural transformation necessary to conquer child poverty.

That day marks an important shift for her and other early care and education providers in Nebraska who serve low-income families. On that date, the state intended to begin paying providers a consistent rate for families who use government subsidies to pay for child care. 

Instead of reimbursing providers based on children’s attendance — which can vary wildly, especially this time of year, based on factors like illness and family travel — Nebraska would pay providers the same amount each month based on enrollment. 

Last year, because of the change expected to come in summer 2026, Hampson, who owns a home-based child care program in Lincoln, Nebraska, felt comfortable filling more of her program slots with children whose families pay with subsidies. Today, she does not have one private-paying family. She made the shift assuming the enrollment-based pay would insulate her from the instability that often accompanies subsidy slots. 

“I was super excited to know more of these families were going to get that quality, consistent care,” Hampson said, adding that reaching more low-income families is important in the field. “It’s not that providers don’t want to.”

Now, though, that could all be about to change. 

Nebraska’s transition to enrollment-based pay was part of an effort to get in compliance with a rule . Enrollment-based payments, that administration believed, would create greater predictability for providers, allowing them to serve more low-income families who need child care and, eventually, could entice more providers to participate in the subsidy program. 

The rule was one of a handful of changes made by the prior administration related to the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), the primary federal program that states use to provide financial assistance to low-income families in need of child care. Other shifts include paying providers up front for child care, rather than reimbursing them the following month, and encouraging the use of grants and contracts with providers. timelines for implementing these changes have varied. As of September 2025, 24 states were paying based on enrollment, according to an by New America. For the others, the latest deadline granted was Aug. 1, 2026. 

Just this week, however, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, through the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), that it would seek to rescind many of the 2024 rules, returning these issues to states. 

The cannot be enforced right away. Under federal law, the agency is required to take public comments, review them, and use that input to make final decisions, noted Alex Adams, who leads ACF. He declined to give a timeline for any changes to take effect.

If approved, the changes would not “make any net new policy decisions,” he added. “It simply goes back to where we were prior to 2024 regulations.”

The administration wants to rescind the 2024 rules, he said, because all 50 states had requested waivers related to some or all of these rules due to budget constraints and other implementation challenges.��

“Any time 50 states are asking for a waiver from something,” Adams said, “it suggests to me that maybe the rule isn’t working as intended.”

He also noted that “attendance-verified payment,” rather than enrollment-based, “is more of a deterrent to fraud.” Leaders in the Trump administration are concerned about programs with “phantom attendance” — suggesting they receive government payments but don’t actually serve the children they say they do — Adams said, but he declined to share specifics of ongoing investigations. 

Many early care and education advocates and policy experts have that rampant fraud and abuse is going unchecked. 

Casey Peeks, senior director of early childhood policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, called the allegations “unfounded” and worried that they would undo real progress made in the field in recent years. 

“It is very unhelpful and destabilizing to the sector, in the immediate- and long-term, to take some of these most foundational levers we have to stabilize the sector and claim that they result in fraud,” Peeks said.

Upon hearing the news this week, Hampson said she’s had to remind herself to “just breathe.” She knew she was taking a risk by enrolling 100% of families on subsidies.

Now, she said, she will have to rearrange her budget to continue to serve all of those families. Under an attendance-based pay structure, her income is just that much more volatile.

In December, for example, between holidays, vacation time and children’s absences, Hampson was only able to bill the state for 18 child care days. If the children in her program were from private-paying families, she would have been paid for 23 days, she said. 

But Hampson’s operational costs didn’t see a material decrease in December. 

“Without a provider being at fault at all, they could be at 50% attendance one day just because the flu is going around. That shouldn’t harm their bottom line,” Peeks said. 

“It’s really unpredictable and unfair for the provider,” she added. “Just because attendance is down doesn’t mean operation costs go down.”

In West Virginia, where providers have been paid based on enrollment since 2020, Katelyn Vandal emphasized how critical the change has been to keeping her rural, center-based program open. 

“Our mortgage payment doesn’t cost less because two kids in the classroom have the flu,” noted Vandal, director of A Place to Grow, a child care center in Oak Hill, West Virginia. Nor does her electricity bill and a host of other overhead costs. 

If her state returns to attendance-based pay, she’s not sure A Place to Grow would be able to continue operating. The center serves about 100 kids, with 60% from families that pay with subsidies. 

“We run such a fine budget line anyway that if, six months from now, we were going back to attendance, we would be looking at closing,” she said. “We would not survive transitioning back to that.”

Sheryl Hutzenbiler, owner of Munchkin Land Daycare in Billings, Montana, said she suspects that, under attendance-based pay, providers will either raise tuition rates on families — many of whom are already paying the maximum they can afford without one parent leaving the workforce — or, like Vandal, be forced to close their doors. 

But that is not a decision Hutzenbiler will have to face, should the Trump administration successfully restore attendance-based pay. Since she lives in Montana, where enrollment-based pay became in 2023, she and other providers in the state are protected from policy fluctuations at the federal level. 

That’s true for a , which have either passed laws protecting enrollment-based pay or have continued paying based on enrollment, on a temporary basis, since the pandemic. (West Virginia is in the latter category.)

Enrollment-based pay has been pivotal for Hutzenbiler, whose home-based program consists of about 60% of families who pay with subsidies. Back when she was paid based on attendance, she said her first sacrifice during low-attendance months would be her own wages. She would pay her full-time teacher first and make sure program costs were covered, often leaving nothing for herself and relying on her husband’s income instead. With the consistent subsidy income each month, though, she’s not only been able to avoid missed paychecks for herself, she’s been able to add two part-time workers to the payroll. 

Hampson, in Nebraska, said she was part of a group last year advocating for the state to pass around enrollment-based pay. It was ultimately unsuccessful.

“We wanted to know our state had already said yes, so we wouldn’t go backwards,” she said. “And here we are going backwards.”

In an industry where profit margins are at less than 1%, these changes will inevitably leave providers who participate in the subsidy program with less revenue to survive on. The shifts will likely also deter providers who participate in the subsidy program, or who might have considered participating, from doing so in the future, said Peeks. This will likely, in effect, leave low-income families with fewer choices about where to go for child care. 

“When you’re stabilizing providers overall, you’re often creating more options for families overall,” said Peeks. “I think it could definitely have a chilling effect.”

Keeping to this ambitious timeline has depended on more than picking a location and making sure the facility meets regulatory standards. The initiative’s success depends on building a strong, sustainable workforce. It’s not just finding talented, certified early educators and getting them to show up on opening day, but creating a plan to retain them year over year. 

In light of an uncertain economy and a number of systemic factors, achieving this goal may be easier said than done. “We recognize many organizations have experienced challenges in attracting educators. Fewer people are entering the field, which makes it even more important to invest in developing and supporting those who choose this career,” said Beth Kroutch, human resources director for Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning. 

With three centers already open and three set to open by fall 2027, Kroutch stressed the importance of planning ahead and forging partnerships. One approach her team has taken, she said, “is to reach out proactively to local colleges and universities in advance to talk about our organization, engage in a partnership and make a connection that hopefully shows benefits to both parties.” In addition to developing partnerships with local higher education institutions, the Catherine Hershey Schools have an internship program for high school students that offers a pathway to employment. She also described other recruitment strategies such as social media and career fairs. 

Kroutch is right. Other early learning leaders are feeling the pain, too. “I spend most of my waking hours contemplating this topic,” said Rhian Allvin, founder of , a network of three centers — two in northern Virginia and one in Washington, D.C. It was never easy to attract talent to a profession with low wages, poor or nonexistent benefits and minimal opportunities for career advancement. And it’s a challenge to keep early educators in the field. Physical demands, long hours and emotional stress of the work all contribute to a in early childhood education.

A dramatic intensification of immigration enforcement has exacerbated these challenges. A considerable segment of the early care and education workforce are immigrants — at least 21% nationwide, according to published by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) at the University of California, Berkeley. With the of protections limiting federal immigration arrests around sensitive sites, about immigration raids on schools and child care programs have escalated and many providers are faced with difficult decisions like .

Felicia Jones Taylor, co-founder of , a consultancy that provides technical assistance to child care centers, underscored the impact of immigration policies on early educators. “Immigrants came from their countries with transferable skills. They have experience working with children, but there are barriers preventing them from participating in this workforce,” she said. 

More than other workplaces, child care centers are protective communities that support kids and families, said Lauren Hogan, managing director of policy and professional advancement at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). When educators are afraid, it affects the whole community.

Amid major workforce challenges, developing creative approaches to recruiting and retaining qualified child care staff has become increasingly important, early learning leaders said. Wages came up again and again as the most powerful recruitment tool. The child care , which is predominantly female and often women of color, has long endured . Unless and until things change, compensation will remain a leading reason why it’s hard to attract new talent, and why some experienced providers for higher-paying jobs. Caitlin McLean, a senior research specialist at CSCCE, summarized the problem: “You’ve invested that money in training people to work with kids and who probably would like to work with kids, but they end up leaving.” While the profession is rewarding, she noted, it is also demanding, and the supports that might keep them on the job aren’t always readily available.

of child care providers are considering leaving the workforce. that increasing pay reduces turnover and some programs have raised wages. The , a child care program that arose in Austin, Texas, in 2018, with a drop-in care model to offer flexibility for families, pays its educators $28 per hour, according to the center’s founder Choquette Hamilton. That’s nearly twice , according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. To make this level of compensation possible, Hamilton said the center uses a braided funding model including support from the city of Austin’s . 

The choice to prioritize compensation was intentional. “That rate was a decision from the beginning,” said Hamilton. “The educators do feel respected and valued. All of our recruitment has come from word of mouth, so they definitely tell their friends, but sadly, it still isn’t enough, because the work is not full-time at that rate.” She explained that many of their educators work part time and are gig workers who piece together their livelihoods working multiple jobs. 

While compensation is key, leaders said a thoughtful recruitment and retention strategy goes beyond the paycheck. “There are lots of ways that directors demonstrate, in partnership with the families, just how much they really appreciate the work that the early childhood educators are doing,” explained NAEYC’s Hogan. She cited Children’s Village, a nonprofit preschool in Philadelphia, as an example of a program illustrating that appreciation by for employees including health care, vacation, sick leave and a retirement plan. “Most of our educators do not have access to that,” she said. “That demonstrates caring for them in a real way, thinking about their long-term well-being.” Hogan also pointed to the for child care workers to access child care for their own children, and said, “It has definitely had an impact on recruitment and retention, helping staff come in and stay and feel supported.” 

In addition to improving working conditions and pulling levers that make the field more hospitable, building a robust pipeline of candidates is also crucial. Keeping a full staff in place often means recruiting more people than you think you might need, but even in the rare instances when a child care program is able to offer and sustain higher pay and good benefits for employees, there are other factors that make it hard to hire and keep employees. Candidates are juggling personal and professional stressors that often shape their decisions. 

Allvin described frequent instances in which an educator will get through the screening part of the hiring process at Brynmor, but fail to show up for the interview. “We don’t ever hear from them again,” she says. “It happens all the time.” 

One point all leaders were sure to make is that community is key to retention, but building it takes time. The first year is critical, leaders said. Once staff see the investment, culture and support, they’re more likely to stay long term.

“You lose people mostly within the first six months,” said Allvin. Keeping the turnover rate under 20% per year has been a steady challenge. She expressed relief that after two years at her flagship site in Lorton, Virginia, the center finally has no openings to fill.

Kroutch said that because there are a number of Catherine Hershey Schools for Early Learning, her team has been able to show potential staff members for new locations what the culture is like by inviting them to open house events at existing sites. Meeting candidates in person is important, Kroutch said. It’s a first step in building community. 

In the face of staffing challenges, many child care professionals who are responsible for hiring and maintaining staff, have adopted an all-of-the-above approach, and have maintained optimism in spite of the odds. “Just because the system is broken,” Hogan mused, “does not mean that it is beyond fixing.”