The threat wasn’t the Cold War; it wasn’t tension in the Middle East; and it wasn’t international or domestic terrorism.

The threat was a lack of affordable, accessible, high-quality child care.

The makeup of the armed forces changed following the shift from a national draft to an all-volunteer military after the war in Vietnam. More service members had families in the late 1970s and 1980s — many of them with young children. And many more of those families included two working parents than in previous decades.

The child care crisis faced by the military 40 to 50 years ago was similar to the one civilians face today. More families with working parents increased the demand for child care. Thousands of children languished on waitlists, forcing families to consider forms of supervision that lacked consistent standards for safety, teacher training, student/teacher ratios, and curricula. Teachers were poorly compensated, and turnover was high.

Back then, as now, parents couldn’t afford the fees necessary to cover the costs of addressing these challenges, and limited public investment wasn’t enough to fill the gap.

Because the child care crisis was seen as a threat to the collective future of Americans, elected officials took action. Congress passed the , which put a priority on affordability, accessibility, and quality in child care for service members.

With the that were undertaken during the pandemic, North Carolinians now face a similar threat to our own collective future. The military’s approach offers lessons for where we can go from here, in our communities and across our state.

An experiment in universal child care

The Military Child Care Act wasn’t the first time the military had taken the lead on child care. During World War II, women entered the workforce in massive numbers, filling the roles of men who were drafted to serve in the military. This raised the question of who would care for children when both parents were working outside the home to defend American interests.

Congress responded with the , creating a nationwide, universal child care system to support working families with children through age 12. Federal grants were issued to communities that demonstrated their need for child care related to parents working in the defense industry.

The program distributed $1.4 billion (in 2025 dollars) between 1943 and 1946 to more than 600 communities in 47 states. The grants could be used to build and maintain child care facilities, train and compensate teachers, and provide meals to students.

In his of the Lanham Act’s outcomes for mothers and children, Chris M. Herbst, of Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs, found that “the Lanham Act increased maternal employment several years after the program was dismantled.”

Herbst also found that “children exposed to the program were more likely to be employed, to have higher earnings, and to be less likely to receive cash assistance as adults.”

One lesson Herbst took from his research was that the Lanham Act was successful because of the broad support it received from parents, advocates for education and women, and employers. He noted: “Each group was committed to its success because something larger was at stake.”

Today’s military-operated child care model

While the Lanham Act was a short-lived national experiment that hasn’t received much study, the military’s child care program since adoption of the Military Child Care Act of 1989 has become a widely acclaimed model for publicly subsidized early care and learning, serving about 200,000 children each year.

Four categories of child care are available through military-operated child care programs: Child Development Centers (CDCs), Family Child Care (FCC), 24/7 Centers, and School Aged Care (SAC). describes each program type:

• Child Development Centers (CDCs) — CDCs provide child care services for infants, pretoddlers, toddlers, and preschoolers. They operate Monday through Friday during standard work hours, and depending on the location offer full-day, part-day, and hourly care.
• Family Child Care (FCC) —  Family child care is provided by qualified child care professionals in their homes. Designed for infants through school agers, each FCC provider determines what care they offer, which may include full-day, part-day, school year, summer camp, 24/7, and extended care. 
• 24/7 Centers — 24/7 Centers provide child care for infants through school age children in a home-like setting during both traditional and non-traditional hours on a regular basis. The program is designed to support watch standers or shift workers who work rotating or non-traditional schedules (i.e., evenings, overnights, and weekends). 
• School Aged Care (SAC) — School age care is facility-based care for children from the start of kindergarten through the end of the summer after seventh grade. This program type operates Monday through Friday during standard work hours. SAC programs provide both School Year Care and Summer Camp.

Requirements for military-operated child care programs are typically more stringent than state requirements. For one thing, they must be accredited by one of the following: National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), National Early Childhood Program Accreditation (NECPA), the Council on Accreditation (COA), or the National Accreditation Commission (NAC).

For context, the requirements for licensed child care in North Carolina are relatively stringent compared with other states, but still fall below the requirements for NAEYC accreditation, which is widely recognized as the national standard. Only in our state are NAEYC-accredited — many of which are Head Start or military-operated programs — out of about .

Military-operated child care programs offer families hourly, part-day, full-day, extended, or overnight care, plus afterschool and summer programs.

Fees are on a , ranging from $45 to $224 per week.

The maximum rate is on par with the national average for civilian child care in 2023, meaning that almost every family using military-operated child care programs is paying less than the national average for typically higher-quality early care and learning.

The Department of Defense budgeted about $1.8 billion for child care in 2024 — about 0.2% of its $841.4 billion total budget.

Military child care in North Carolina

In addition to military-operated child care programs, service members may be eligible for (MCCYN), a fee assistance program for families who can’t access military-operated child care. MCCYN pays a portion of the cost of enrolling children in early care and learning programs that meet the military’s high-quality standards in their community.

North Carolina is one of 19 locations where military families may be eligible for , which expands the MCCYN program to child care programs that participate in state or local Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) in places where nationally accredited care is not available.

Both programs rely on the availability of high-quality child care in civilian communities. That’s a challenge in North Carolina, which was already facing a child care shortage before the pandemic. Our state has lost almost 6% of licensed child care programs since February 2020, because stabilization grants have ended.

According to the , there are 12 military bases and more than 130,000 active-duty military members in North Carolina, giving us the fourth-largest active-duty military population in the nation.

In January 2025, hosted the state’s first N.C. Military Community Childcare Summit, organized by the North Carolina Department of Military and Veteran Affairs (NCDMVA) to discuss the problem that military communities are having with access to community-based child care.

The summit culminated in a , a documentary about North Carolina’s child care crisis produced by the state Department of Health and Human Services and featuring EdNC’s early childhood reporter, Liz Bell.

Along similar lines, at the in April 2025, the theme was and the summit included a .

Higher compensation for higher quality

The issues of spouse resilience and child care are inextricably linked for Angie Mullennix, who works for at Fort Bragg, helping members of the U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) transition to careers in the private sector after their military service.

Mullennix served in the U.S. Army for four years after high school and has previously worked for the Department of Public Instruction as the state military liaison. Her husband recently retired from the SOF himself. They have two teenage children.

“If you look at the number of military spouses in North Carolina who have degrees and credentials and could be in the workforce, from nurses to lawyers, lots of them are staying at home,” Mullennix said.

“A big reason why about 40% of (military) spouses do not work is because of child care not being available to them,” Mullennix said, noting that lack of child care is also a barrier to workforce participation among the civilian population.

When Mullennix’s children were under the age of 5, she used hourly child care on base, which was available at no cost when her husband was away on assignment.

“You ask any parent in the world, I don’t care who they are, there’s nothing more important than their child’s safety — then their education,” Mullennix said. “And yet, the two things we think are the most important, we put (their providers) at the lowest pay and ask them to do quality care.”

That’s what sets military child care apart from civilian early care and learning for Mullennix: high quality standards and higher pay for early childhood educators, including benefits. She sees lessons in this for North Carolina.

“You gotta pay them to keep them, there’s no secret behind that,” Mullennix said. “If you pay them high, you can also set the standards really high.”

And because workforce participation — and military readiness — is directly tied to the accessibility and affordability of high-quality child care, not investing in it threatens our collective future.

“North Carolina, or any state that doesn’t offer child care, is shooting itself in the foot,” Mullennix said.

Lessons from military child care

Policymakers at every level who are seeking to end the child care crisis can learn much from the military child care model. offers these lessons:

1. Do not be daunted by the task. It is possible to take a woefully inadequate child care system and dramatically improve it.
2. Recognize and acknowledge the seriousness of the child care problem and the consequences of inaction. 
3. Improve quality by establishing and enforcing comprehensive standards, assisting providers in becoming accredited, and enhancing provider compensation and training. 
4. Keep parent fees affordable through subsidies. 
5. Expand the availability of all kinds of care by continually assessing unmet need and taking concrete action steps to address it. 
6. Commit the resources necessary to get the job done. 

That report was published 25 years ago by the National Women’s Law Center, but its lessons hold up today. Similar lessons have been highlighted in more recent articles published by , ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ Million, and , along with before the Council for a Strong America dissolved last year.

EdNC ran these lessons by , CEO of , and , director of policy for the at the University of Nebraska — and one of the primary architects of the military child care system.

Both agreed these are the right takeaways for policymakers across North Carolina to consider.

Lesson 1: Do not be daunted by the task

Gale Perry said the top lesson for her is: “Start where you are, know that change is possible, and have a goal post in mind.”

She pointed out that the military’s goal wasn’t a fully publicly funded child care system. It was a system that acknowledged Americans’ values around the role of parents in raising young children — and paying for their care and education. But also that their employers and the government “have a role in offsetting that cost, so that we can ensure that child care is quality, and it is stable, and that the families can actually afford it.”

Smith said there was no “silver bullet” when she and her colleagues were tasked with solving the military’s child care crisis in the 1990s — and there isn’t one for the civilian child care crisis today.

We had to redo the standards, we had to look at the workforce, we had to look at the health and safety issues, we had to look at the fees and how we could bring those fees down. We had to look at the infrastructure of all of it. We’ve got to start thinking about the interconnectedness of all of these things if we’re going to be successful in this country.

Smith said people think that because she worked for the secretary of defense, “I could just tell all the bases what to do, and that would magically happen, which is so not true. It wasn’t just like we could give an order and everybody jumped.”

She said you just have to start where you are, and move up.

Lesson 2: Acknowledge the seriousness of the problem and the consequences of inaction

“The military understood very early the link between people getting to work and child care,” Smith said.

As the military shifted away from relying on conscription and became a more welcoming workplace for women, the need for child care became evident. Smith described working on a base where children were routinely left in cars when their parents were unexpectedly called into work.

“So (military leaders) really got the connection to their guys going to work very quickly, and I think that we still haven’t all understood that in this country,” Smith said, though she notes businesses have started making that connection since the pandemic.

“The other thing the military understood was that a pilot is every bit as important as the mechanic who works on the plane, and so they invest in all of their people,” Smith said.

She and her team had to design a program that worked for everyone, or it wouldn’t work for anyone.

Lesson 3: Improve quality

Smith said quality was of critical importance when she was designing the military’s child care system in the 1990s, especially after child abuse and neglect scandals that came to light in the 1980s.

She and her team studied the child care standards of all 50 states and created a set of military standards that fell squarely in the middle. Then they set about training the 22,000 early childhood educators they already had — most of whom were military spouses — to meet those standards.

That was a six-month training program. Then there was an 18-month training to get them to move beyond those standards toward national accreditation. They hired highly qualified trainers to work with educators at each site.

“And if you didn’t do it, guess what? You’re fired!” Smith said.

There was an incentive to participate in the training, beyond keeping their jobs — higher compensation.

“Maybe some were grumpy about it, but we didn’t have to fire people,” Smith said.

North Carolina already has some tools in place to help educators advance their education and improve their compensation, specifically through the WAGE$ and TEACH programs — both of which were highlighted in the report that identified these lessons.

“(The military) realized they had to get serious about quality and quality standards. And I would say that’s a lesson for us now, particularly in a climate that is deregulatory,” Gale Perry said. “And while I’m for sensible regulatory reform, I think we have to be really thoughtful about not wanting stacks of child deaths in child care sitting on a desk waiting to be investigated.”

Lesson 4: Keep parent fees affordable through subsidies

Smith said that while designing the military’s child care program, she and her team figured out that there was no way parents could afford the actual cost of high-quality child care. So they set up a subsidized system that would provide a 50% match — on average — to parents’ fees, paid directly to child care programs.

“We had to, on average, match parent fees dollar-for-dollar, with the higher-income people paying more and the lower-income paying less,” Smith said. “So a major, for example, would pay two-thirds of the cost, and a private would pay one-third, but the average was 50/50.”

Smith pointed out that we’re already subsidizing child care in ways that are hidden — through the public benefits and social programs that early childhood educators often rely on because of low compensation, and through lack of workforce participation.

Lesson 5: Expand the availability of all kinds of care

Gale Perry said the military’s model really stands out to her for its ability to assess unmet needs and take action to improve.

“In the early 2000s when there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were a lot of deployments of National Guard and Reserve who did not live on post and did not have access to on-post child care,” Gale Perry said. “That is really when the military got in the business of thinking about, how do we help build capacity and make child care accessible for military families off post?”

That’s when the MCCYN came about, subsidizing high-quality early care and learning in a broader array of settings in the communities where service members live.

Smith said that the Military Child Care Act was originally targeted toward child care centers, but she recalls briefing the assistant secretary of defense on the potential effects of that strategy when they were designing the system:

I remember saying we need to apply all of this to family child care, to school-aged care, to part-day preschools, because if we don’t, all the parents are going to have a demand on these centers that we can’t meet, right? Because if you lower the cost in the centers and you improve the quality, why would somebody go to another place when they get it cheaper and better over here?

She made the case for educators in every setting getting the same access to training and the same level of compensation, because that’s what would work best for everyone.

“Everything applies to everybody,” Smith said. “And I think that was one of the smartest policy decisions we made.”

Lesson 6: Commit the resources necessary to get the job done

“There was this perception that we just had a lot of money and we threw it at” child care, Smith said. But that wasn’t the case.

“When they passed the Military Child Care Act, it didn’t come with an appropriation,” Gale Perry said. “So they had to fight equally hard for the funding, and a lot of the funding actually ended up coming from local base commanders making the decision to invest in child care.”

Now the military submits a budget request to Congress each year, and depends on those appropriations.

For state and local policymakers seeking to solve the civilian child care crisis without public investment, the woman credited with solving the military’s own child care crisis 35 years ago has a message.

“It’s gonna cost. There’s no way it doesn’t cost,” Smith said.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

While public schools have struggles, families can navigate a district with elementary, middle, and high schools. But, early child care education doesn’t have the same infrastructure. We’ve been overlooking a national program for child care that could solve this issue — the child care system for military families. This model could serve as a valuable blueprint for establishing a more comprehensive and accessible child care infrastructure for all American families.

More than of families in this country live in child care deserts, a census tract with more than three times as many children as licensed child care slots. Furthermore, roughly children will likely lose spots resulting from the end of pandemic relief federal funds for child care, which expired September 30, 2023. Without child care, children miss out on early education, and parents find it hard to work and support their families. This also affects businesses, as our current child care system isn’t strong enough to meet the needs of working families. 

Prior to the , military families struggled to access reliable child care, and child care providers lacked resources to offer high-quality consistent care. After the act passed, wages increased for early educators working in military child care programs, standards increased for child care and military families could reliably access affordable care. The resulting system was mixed delivery, meaning families could access child care in a variety of settings, including larger centers and home-based child care programs. In 2020, about , compared with 9 percent of civilian centers nationwide.

This model can serve as a blueprint for increasing accessibility to child care for more families. It begins with dedicated, sustained public investment in child care across multiple settings so children and families have access to child care that meets their needs. Tessie Ragan, a veteran and owner of Perfect Start Learning in California, participates in the military child care program because of the opportunity it affords to provide high-quality early learning opportunities to a diverse group of children & families.

Data shows that access to high-quality early childhood care has significant lifelong benefits. One showed that children from low-income backgrounds who received 24 months of early childhood education before age 5 had higher graduation rates and earned higher salaries by 26 percent compared to peers without access. 

However, the number of regulated home-based child care programs (also called family child care) has been in steep decline. From December 2019 to March 2021, family child care (FCC) programs closed in 36 states, representing a 10 percent loss in licensed FCC programs. This is on top of the more than 97,000 (25%) licensed family child care homes closed in the United States between 2005 and 2017.

According to a 2023 survey of NAFCC members, 32 percent of respondents stated their income does not allow them to cover expenses like rent, utilities, and supplies. Educators who care for children from their homes and operate as small businesses often make far below minimum wage. Family care providers must cover these expenses without federal subsidies, often forcing many of them to to cover costs and provide for their own families.

As we have learned from the military child care system, well-funded early-learning programs include dollars so that early educators like Ragan can cover the costs of competitive wages for staff, rent, insurance, materials, and professional development. 

Every parent wants what’s best for their kids and high-quality child care should be broadly available. A well-funded early care and education system enhances workforce participation, particularly . As parents have more opportunities to work and advance in their careers, their families and the overall economy benefit.

By leaning into the federal child care education model and advocating for increased funding we can build a robust child care system that supports families and empowers early care and education providers ensuring a brighter future for all our children.

Chris Riback: Dr. Bisa, thank you for coming to the studio.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Thank you. I’m enjoying being here already.

Chris Riback: Well, I hope it only goes up from here. It’s a lot of pressure you’re putting on me. Tell me about BCDI-Atlanta. What’s the community like?

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: We are the only actually affiliate in Georgia of the National Black Child Development Institute. And our community, I love that it’s so diverse because we have a lot of childcare providers, a lot of social workers, a lot of medical professionals, a lot of legislators and leaders who are part of our affiliate group. And so they’re members of the organization and/or they’re partners of the organization. So the community is amazing because people come together for the needs of Black children and families.

Chris Riback: Tell me about your three key focus areas: early care and education, literacy and family engagement. Tell me about the challenges and how you’re dealing with each one. Let’s start with early care and education.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Early care and education, our goal is to increase the diversity of early care and education, especially when it comes to leaders, and whether that mean in the boardroom or actually in leadership roles and positions, because we know that representation matters, and it’s not just about skin color, but it’s about the diversity and what you do and what you can bring in terms of information, advice, resources. So we know that diversity is key, but in Georgia specifically, we don’t have a lot of diversity, almost any, at the higher levels, if you will, especially at the state level.

We don’t have any state leaders of color, especially at the commissioner level. So it’s really important for us to breed leaders. So whatever we’re being told barrier-wise, why there aren’t diverse leaders, we are making sure that we support people in learning those skills. So we have fellowships, and we’re in a couple of programs to help early educators, anyone who’s in a child-serving program to improve their skills. Leadership-wise, educationally we’re helping them earn their credentials, and we’re coaching them through earning their first credentials and providing stipends and just so much to support.

And we’re also helping them to get on boards, develop a leadership profile and an advocacy profile so that they will know how to advocate for the needs of their community.

Chris Riback: And is that the early childhood education fellowship that you were just describing?

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Yes.

Chris Riback: Or is that something else?

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Yes. It’s called Expand ECE, Expand Early Care and Education. Yes.

Chris Riback: Tell me about the two other focus areas, literacy and family engagement.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Our role in literacy, we want to make sure that books are diverse as well, that children get to see. But it’s not just about the diversity of books. The big goal is to improve and increase the literacy skills. Our children not starting school ready to learn, the third grade reading scores are not where they should be. And we want to improve that. Third grade reading scores, unfortunately are connected to the prison rates.

Chris Riback: Connected to so much-

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: And we want to-

Chris Riback: … later on.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: So much.

Chris Riback: All the data’s there.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Yes. So we want to get in there early and encourage children to read books. And we do that by allowing them to see themselves on the cover and in the books.

Chris Riback: You recently released the State of the Black Child Report Card for Georgia, and I took a look at it. Parts of that were tough to read. You have some challenges.

One of the recommendations was that you support positive discipline and an end to suspensions and expulsions. And I’ve read and talked with leaders like you about this topic, and one of the statistics that you cited from ProPublica: “While Black children comprise 37% of Georgia’s public schools, Black students are 3.6 times more likely to be suspended as white students.” Any student getting suspended like that hits at the heart, but it does happen more often with Black students. And I believe, you correct me if I’m wrong, Black boys in particular.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Oh, definitely Black boys, yes.

Chris Riback: What’s the why? And perhaps most challengingly, what can be done?

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Yes. The why mainly is people don’t really know how to work with Black children and the challenges that they faced. Since COVID, everyone at this point, no matter where you are culturally or race-wise, you’ve experienced some type of trauma due to COVID-19, right? We were in our houses for a year. But Black children and families are often born in trauma, having experienced trauma. And so educationally, educators don’t always know what to do because the behaviors and the needs are not being met. They don’t know necessarily what to do. And it’s worse now because… I’ve heard the teachers call them COVID babies. That since COVID, they have far more children in their classroom with special needs, especially autism, and some have not been diagnosed.

So part of it is culturally and the challenges that the families face. And if you have a middle class teacher from a two-parent home, and then add the cultural piece to it that they have never experienced what you’ve experienced, they don’t know what to do other than suspend you or expel you from school.

Chris Riback: Is there an education opportunity there?

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: It’s definitely an education opportunity there. NBCDI started delivering on the promise. And so through delivering on the promise, that initiative, we were able to get legislation. I’ll say we passed the Senate, and then we pulled back, and we’re repurposing it because we didn’t want to cause some of the other previous legislation a problem. So now we’re working together to revise the legislation to provide wraparound services in schools. Before you can suspend a child, you have to provide them some type of services. So that’s what we’re working on now is legislation to support the educators.

Chris Riback: That’s a terrific idea. Maybe a step between a situation that could be taken in the wrong… Put some opportunity between that situation and the suspension. That doesn’t necessarily have to occur.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: What can we do? Yes.

Chris Riback: What can we do? One other recommendation that you had that I wanted to ask you about: support social-emotional development and mental health of Black children. I’m hearing so much focus on this in Atlanta, but other communities that I’m getting to talk with. Has the problem gotten worse, or is the main problem a lack of historical focus on the issue?

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: It’s a little bit of both, but it’s definitely has gotten worse, especially since COVID. And the social-emotional piece is more proactive versus reactive. When we talk about suspension and expulsions, we’re being reactive. But if we support their social and emotional development early on, then we’re helping the child to know how to deal with their own emotions.

When you’re upset, it’s okay to be angry, but how do I handle my anger versus acting it out on someone else? So helping the children and helping the adults in their lives to help the children to know what to do when they have those feelings. Especially Black boys are often called aggressive, but also Black boys are adultified. There’s an adultification of Black boys, so they have all these duties they have to do, and they’re only five.

So there are so many reasons why social emotionally, they’re having the feelings and the actions, the behaviors that we’re seeing at home and at school. And so supporting and being proactive versus reactive with the social-emotional learning and development, professional development, that’s going to help everyone to know how to deal with children and support them in helping themselves.

Chris Riback: What a great message that is. Proactive and reactive.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Yes.

Chris Riback: You have your work cut out for you.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Yes, we do.

Chris Riback: Dr. Bisa, thank you for coming by the studio.

Dr. Bisa Batten Lewis: Thank you. I enjoyed it. Great conversation.