Beyond The Pod: S5E3: How We Make Child Care More Accessible
America’s child care system is in crisis. Across the country, families are struggling with skyrocketing costs, long waitlists, and a shortage of open centers. How did we get here?
In Episode 3 of our nationally acclaimed hit podcast, ”No One Is Coming to Save Us”, Dr. Jeffrey Liebman, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, joins veteran reporter and host Gloria Riviera to break down the root causes of the child care crisis, how it impacts families nationwide, and what a better system could look like if public investment matched the child care needs of families and provided all children with the early education opportunities they deserve.
What do we mean by “child care crisis” and how does it impact families?
For families, the child care crisis comes down to the accessibility and affordability of quality care and early education for their children.
Since the pandemic, the price of child care has risen over 25%, with families in Massachusetts now paying an average of $40,000 in child care tuition. Even when families can “afford” the steep cost of child care, many are not able to secure a spot for their child. Most Americans live in what’s known as a child care desert, where there is only one available slot for every three children in need. Waitlists can be particularly long for infant and toddler care.
So how did we get here? In October 2024, Dr. Liebman released “An Economic Analysis of the Childcare and Early Education Market in Massachusetts”, a report identifying the market failures that limit access to quality early education particularly for low- and middle-income families. The report also revealed that just 52% of children ages 0–4 in Massachusetts are enrolled in formal early education or care. Additionally, 80% of families not currently utilizing formal care say they would if it costs were lower.
The impact of the child care crisis on families is profound. In preparation for the podcast, we asked listeners to share their experiences with finding child care. Their stories reflect just how difficult we are making it for families with very young children:
“ I had my second kid in late 2022 and I realized that it was going to cost $27,000 to have two kids under the age of three in care. I was only making $34,000, and so my husband and I made the decision for me to leave the workforce”, says Rianna.
“I called some daycares when I was about two months pregnant, just finding out, and wanted to get a sense of how much things would cost. Much to my horror, when I called the daycares, they all told me that there was a two year waiting list… Here I was calling, just trying to budget and be responsible, and I already felt behind,” explained Maggie.
Economist and public policy expert Dr. Jeffrey Liebman calls this the real crisis. “ Many children in America cannot find a place to get high quality child care. And given how important early education is to life prospects, the fact that we don't have a way to provide every child with a good start in life, you know, that's the crisis, to me.”
Where do we go from here and how do we create a better child care system?
Simply put, if we’re serious about improving family and child access to high-quality, affordable child care and early education, it takes increasing the amount of public funds we dedicate to the early childhood education (ECE) sector.
Neighborhood Villages’ recent report, High-Quality Early Childhood Education: Opening the Books on its True Costs, offers a detailed look at the per-child costs of providing early education and care in Massachusetts. The data show that the amount of public funds we invest in early education is far below the actual cost to ECE providers to offer high-quality ECE programs. As a result, while the annual tuition for two children in center-based care (one infant and one 4-year-old) is more than $40,000, early educators earn an average of just $18 per hour.
Massachusetts has made important progress in improving the affordability and accessibility of child care. The Commonwealth Cares for Children (C3) operations grants, launched in 2021 and made permanent in 2024, have played a crucial role in stabilizing the state’s early education and care sector, supporting program quality, stabilizing tuition, boosting educator pay, and preventing widespread closures. With the Massachusetts House of Representatives and State Senate both recently proposing over $1.7 billion to early education and care in their FY2026 budget proposals, Massachusetts is setting an example for the nation.
Still, a significant amount of work remains to build the child care system that families, educators, and children need. Dr. Liebman outlines four steps Massachusetts would need to take to make high-quality child care available to all families:
Increase early educator wages in order to stabilize the workforce, increase quality, and enable recruitment of the staff necessary to expand the number of slots;
Make further investments in quality by funding more educator training and developing credentialing paths;
Provide funding for ECE providers’ capital expenses and other start-up costs, so that providers can increase the number of child care slots they offer; and
Expand the number of demand-side income-based subsidies, timed so that the additional subsidies become available as new capacity comes online.
Our child care system, in Massachusetts and nationwide, must be accessible to all. No more waitlists, no more child care deserts, no more tradeoffs. In order to get there, we need public funding that prioritizes accessibility and affordability for families and fair compensation for educators. If we can do this, we can create a resilient, equitable child care system that sets children and families up to thrive. Because that system is possible.