A Moment with Dr. Moore

Making Child Care the American Way: A Look Back at 2025

I have long believed we must mend our broken child care system, and this year most people have shown they agree. Three out of four U.S. adults say child care costs are a “major problem,” according to a recent poll from The Associated Press (AP) and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Almost two-thirds of respondents thought employers should provide free or low-cost care for young children, as AP pointed out when it released the results of the poll last July. Meanwhile, 46 percent said the federal government should make it a high priority to help working families pay for child care, and 45 percent thought children with two parents are better off when one parent stays at home to raise the children. Americans are divided about how to address the child care problem and what role government should play in a solution, making it harder to address the high costs of care. Despite broad consensus on the gravity of the problem, there isn’t a simple fix.

As child advocates and lawmakers search for solutions, America faces a deep child care gap. As of September, over four million children lacked formal care, as the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) pointed out. “This gap often forces parents, especially mothers, to reduce their participation in the workforce, constraining labor supply and economic growth in communities across the country,” BPC explained. “As a result, families struggle to make ends meet and employers struggle to retain talent, threatening economic stability nationwide.”

The dilemma is only becoming worse due to “America’s deepening affordability crisis,” CBS News warned last month. “In 2024, the average annual cost of care for one child topped $13,000, up 30 percent from 2020. Families with a single child can end up paying between nine and 16 percent of their income on full-time child care, meaning that they spend more on child care than they do on other basic expenses, including groceries and rent.”

The burden is even heftier for families with more than one child, CNN reported in May. “On average, placing two children at a child care center costs at least 19 percent more than the typical rent in 49 states and the District of Columbia. The tab also exceeded typical annual mortgage payments in 45 states and DC,” a factor that’s shaping the nation’s future. “Parents and individuals are taking a step back and cost is impacting whether they’re going to expand their family,” Bryan Jamele, Care.com’s head of government affairs and public policy, told CNN, drawing on recent government data that showed the U.S. fertility rate is near a record low.

Most Americans think they can’t afford to raise children, the Washington Post reported in November after the release of a new American Family Survey. “Seven in 10 respondents to the survey said they believe raising kids is too expensive—a 13 percent jump from last year,” according to the survey, which tracks public opinion about family life in the U.S. each year. “This year,” as the Post pointed out, “was the first time in the survey’s 11-year run that Americans said finances were the top reason they capped, or planned to cap, the size of their family.”

And while birth rates are plunging, gender gaps are growing, Forbes reported in March. “America’s intensifying child care crisis is exacerbating the gender pay gap, as more parents—especially mothers—are finding themselves forced to prioritize caring for their children over promotions and pay raises,” Forbes pointed out, based on a recent survey done by KinderCare Learning. The survey showed that most working parents with children below the age of 12 have had to return to the office either full or part time, which made it harder to care for their children.

The lack of quality, cost-effective child care has led working moms to leave the labor force in large numbers, as the Washington Post pointed out in August. “The share of working mothers ages 25 to 44 with young children has fallen nearly every month this year, dropping by nearly three percentage points between January and June, to the lowest level in three years.” Their decision to stop working hurt business and the economy, CNN warned in October, since “working mothers had helped drive much of the job market’s post-pandemic comeback.” Now, mounting public attention to the link between access to child care and economic growth has opened promising roads to change.

The ongoing drop in women’s work has led lawmakers nationwide to search for answers. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was among the first to respond when he announced $6 million to expand access to child care statewide, according to a February report from ABC. Missouri provided $2.5 million to Child Care Works, a program to balance costs between parents, businesses and the state, NPR reported in October. And in November, NPR discussed how “Pennsylvania’s child care funding aims to reopen classrooms and reduce wait lists.” The state’s new budget included a $25 million Childcare Recruitment and Retention line item since “recruitment and retention incentives drive both costs and access,” Lt. Governor Austin Davis told NPR as he praised the bipartisan effort behind the measure. The funding also earned kudos from Ashley Walkowiak, director of the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Women. “These investments,” as she told Fox News last month, “make child care more accessible, affordable and sustainable for families and strengthen our Commonwealth’s child care workforce.”

New Mexico has gone even further by becoming the first state to offer free universal child care, USA Today reported in September. “By investing in universal child care, we are giving families financial relief, supporting our economy and ensuring that every child has the opportunity to grow and thrive,” New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham said in a news release. With Grisham’s support, New Mexico started planning for universal, no-cost child care in 2019, when the state founded the Early Childhood Education and Care Department. Then in 2020, Grisham created the Early Childhood Education and Care Fund with $320 million from surplus oil and gas revenues and federal mineral leasing, in the hope that the fund would grow to $1 billion in 10 years.

It’s an investment with potential high returns, as New Mexico Early Childhood Education and Care Department Secretary Elizabeth Groginsky told USA Today. “We have a declining birth rate in New Mexico, so we’re hopeful that this universal child care will entice more people to grow their families, and also for people to move here and support the workforce.” These are goals that New Mexico already achieved as it served families like Kari Ellis and her wife, Amanda Cordova, who participated in the pilot phase of New Mexico’s child care reform.

Since 2022, the couple has chosen their child care provider while the state has covered the bills, and it’s changed their lives as they told CBS last month. Without free child care, “we wouldn’t be in this house right now and Amanda probably wouldn’t have her own business,” Ellis said. “This has opened doors that I don’t know would have been possible before. We were able to find a quality place where our two children are getting the education and support that they need.” And what’s good for their children is good for us all, a message that’s made its way to trend-setting New York City.

Mayor-elect Zohram Mamdani has promised to bring all New Yorkers free child care, a prospect that has sparked support among residents of the Big Apple. He plans to open child care centers inside the city’s department of education, subsidize rent for the centers and raise wages for child care workers to be in line with public school teachers, as CBS reported last month. Taking these steps will require an estimated $6 billion, but it’s a sound investment, the New York Times claimed last month. If Mamdani’s plan succeeds, “he has the chance to change the lives of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers with young children, many of whom pay over $20,000 a year to send their children to child care.” More than that, “Mamdani’s promise has jolted the conversation about government’s role in child care and the potential impact of a more comprehensive system.”

As the discussion goes on, we need to rethink the way we talk about child care, Elliot Haspel, a senior fellow at the policy think tank Capita told the LA Times in September. “Child care needs to be reframed as an American value,” an argument Haspel made in his recent book Raising a Nation: 10 Reasons Every American Has a Stake in Child Care for All. “A good child care system strengthens our families and means we can stay rooted in our communities and have families the size we want,” Haspel told the Hechinger Report in July. “It’s about giving people the freedom to raise their children the way they want, and that feels very American to me,” Haspel pointed out. So, he contends that “access to high-quality child care is not an individual family obligation but rather a social imperative for us all.” Approaching child care this way will demand “both policy change and cultural change,” Haspel contends—and I agree. We must do more to view the early learning part of our education system as essential to the public good. We can find ways to fix the child care problem if we make affordable care part of the American way.