The “Child Care Shortage” May Also Be a Connection Problem

For years, the child care conversation has been remarkably consistent: there are not enough spaces, families cannot find care, and communities desperately need more capacity. I don’t think families are imagining that experience, and I don’t think the child care shortage is fake or exaggerated. But I do think we may be missing something important in the middle.

A recent short-form survey of child care providers in my program’s city produced a result that is difficult to square with the larger narrative: only about one third of responding programs reported being full. This is happening in Lincoln, Nebraska, the second largest city in the state, while news coverage and family advocacy organizations continue to describe a serious child care shortage and squabble over how to solve it. Those things can both be true, but if they are, we need to understand why.

My program is experiencing a version of this. We are a very small, independently owned early childhood program, and like many programs, we sent a sizable group of children off to kindergarten this year. That creates openings every fall. Usually, those spaces refill by way of waitlists and a barrage of calls coming in. This year, they have been slower to refill than we are accustomed to. Being small gives us an advantage. When your enrollment is measured in dozens of children rather than hundreds, filling a handful of openings can change your occupancy percentage quickly. A larger program with 80, 100 or 150 licensed spaces has a much bigger hill to climb.

So, when our kindergarten class left, we did what businesses are supposed to do when they suddenly have inventory to fill. We marketed. We substantially increased our spending on Google Ads to connect with searchers. On any given day, our program is appearing in front of hundreds of individual people physically located within roughly six miles of our building who are actively searching for child care. These are not passive impressions from people casually scrolling social media. These are people typing words like child care, daycare, and preschool into Google because they are looking for something.

At the same time, provider after provider in our local pulse reported something unusual: fewer inquiries, fewer phone calls and more openings than they are used to carrying. That creates a strange picture. Families are clearly searching for child care, but providers with available space are saying those families are not reaching them.

At first, programs speculated whether a recent public school preschool expansion might explain the change. Perhaps it explains some of it. But public preschool does not necessarily replace the need for child care in the way people sometimes assume it does. A preschool program that operates for part of the day or only during the school year does not fully meet the needs of a parent working a full-time job. Many of those families still need care before school, after school, during breaks or for the rest of the workday. And we do not yet have enough enrollment data from those programs to know whether they are actually absorbing the missing demand anyway.

Another piece of our provider responses complicates that explanation further: toddlers represented a significant share of reported openings. Those children are not leaving for public pre-K. Meanwhile, infant care remains extraordinarily difficult to find in many places, which makes sense structurally. Infant classrooms are expensive to operate, ratios are low, and the number of infant spaces a program can offer is usually small.

What we may be seeing, then, is not one simple shortage. There may be an infant shortage, there may be an affordability problem, there may be a mismatch between the hours families need and the hours programs offer, there may be geographic mismatches, schedule mismatches or age-group mismatches. There may be families who need part-time care when the available opening is full-time, or families who technically find an opening but cannot make the tuition work.

There may also be something our sector has not historically had to think very hard about because of the demand we are used to experiencing: we may have a connection problem.

For many years, private child care programs did not really need sophisticated marketing. Families called, they toured, they enrolled. Many providers maintained waitlists longer than they could realistically serve. When demand consistently exceeds supply, there is very little incentive to become particularly good at reaching consumers. That environment may be changing, and if it is, independent child care providers need to recognize that quickly.

A family needing child care does not automatically know that your program has an opening. They may not know you exist. They may not understand the differences between your program and the one down the street. They may not know whether you accept financial assistance or offer assistance of your own. They may assume your tuition is outside their budget. They may have called four programs, gotten two voicemails and filled out three forms before they ever got a clear answer about whether any of those places even had space.

We have built a public narrative around scarcity. Families are being told constantly that there is a child care shortage. They hear that from the news, from advocacy groups, from other parents and from the broader conversation around child care. If searching itself is exhausting, and every message around them suggests that nothing is available anyway, some families may simply conclude that there are no spaces to be found when they’ve only really reached out to a handful of providers. Meanwhile, programs with actual openings may be sitting there desperately trying to fill them.

That is where the disconnect becomes economically dangerous.

Right now, we do not have enough firsthand information from families to understand where that process is breaking down. Providers talk to each other constantly. We hear stories about why families did or did not enroll somewhere. But those stories are often secondhand, and secondhand information quickly becomes folklore. If we actually want to understand this problem, we need to hear directly from families who are searching for care: What did they search for? Where did they look? What stopped them from calling? What made them reject a program? Was it tuition? Hours? Location? Age restrictions? Availability? Did they assume no one had openings before they ever reached out? Did the enrollment process itself become so burdensome that they stopped searching? Did they find an opening and still decide that child care was economically impossible? Are they waiting on delays in receiving assistance? Did they decide one parent would stop working? Did they find family members to fill the need? Did they cobble together multiple arrangements? Did they simply give up?

Until we fully understand that journey, building more child care capacity may actually make the problem worse.

And there is a bigger reason independent providers should care about getting this right. Empty classrooms are expensive. A classroom does not become dramatically cheaper because two children are missing. The rent is the same. The insurance is the same. The utilities are the same. Much of the staffing still has to exist. Child care programs generally do not operate with enormous margins that allow them to absorb extended enrollment losses.

Several providers responding to our local pulse essentially said the same thing: carrying openings for long periods is not sustainable. That should concern everyone, including families who currently have child care, because if independently owned programs begin closing while families are simultaneously reporting that they cannot find care, the shortage does not improve. It compounds. It balloons. If those programs disappear, rebuilding that capacity before the next wave is extraordinarily difficult.

That raises another issue that I think deserves more attention.

I strongly support the idea that every family should be able to afford quality child care. I support universal access to early childhood education. But universal access does not have to mean universal government delivery. Many successful universal early childhood systems rely on mixed delivery that includes schools, nonprofit programs, community organizations, family child care homes, faith-based programs and independently owned programs. That diversity is essential because child care is not simply school for smaller people.

Education happens in child care, certainly. But something much bigger happens there too. Children are being raised. For many young children, their child care provider is part of their life for eight, nine or ten hours a day, five days a week. These are the people comforting them when they fall, helping them navigate their first friendships, teaching them what to do when they are angry, reading the same book for the fourteenth time, knowing which stuffed animal they need at nap, celebrating when they finally use the potty, holding them when they are overwhelmed and helping them become people.

Families deserve some autonomy over the values and environment surrounding that kind of care.

A family may want a faith-based program because they want their child's daily care to reflect their religious values. Another family may specifically not want that. A family may care deeply about natural materials, outdoor play and limiting certain exposures. Another may strongly value structure, academics or a particular educational philosophy. Some families may want Montessori or Waldorf or Reggio. Others may want play-based learning. Some may want a small, home-like environment. Others may prefer a larger center with more formal systems and structures. These are not the same as “school-choice” arguments. They are values questions during the most important years of their child’s life.

When a young child is spending most of their waking weekday hours in care, families deserve some meaningful ability to choose how that child is physically cared for, emotionally cared for and intellectually cared for. They deserve to choose people and environments and policies and procedures that feel like an extension of how they want their child raised, not just whatever is free and what the authorities say they’re offering.

That is one of the things independent programs are particularly good at offering. As the owner of an independent program, I certainly have boundaries. There are practices we will not change simply because one family requests something different. But I am also directly accountable to the families whose children we care for. Over the years, we have changed policies, altered routines and individualized care because a parent helped us understand that their child needed something different.

There are programs where staff are told, for example, that they should not hug children as a liability policy. I understand why institutions create rules: large systems are built around consistency, liability, and standardization. But if your three-year-old falls, gets hurt and wants to be held, I think families deserve to have an opinion about whether the adult caring for that child is allowed by policy to comfort them in an authentic way that values their development beyond the fear of a major lawsuit. Every program has a collage of small rules and policies like this that makes up their pedagogy and identity in their community, and that diversity is essential to the autonomy of families’ choices in how their young children are raised.

If too many private, independent, and community-based programs disappear, government may eventually be forced to rebuild the lost capacity through school systems or publicly operated programs. Those programs may be excellent at delivering curricula, but large systems inevitably (and must!) rely more heavily on standardized hiring practices, standardized policies, standardized discipline procedures, standardized operating rules, with little room for improvisation or individualized care. Standardization can provide consistency, but early childhood care also benefits enormously from flexibility, strong relationships, and agility in its responsiveness to families.

I sometimes think about something as simple as tying shoes. For generations, teaching a child to tie their shoes (remember shoelaces?) was something families and caregivers simply did as part of their pre-school years. If tomorrow every elementary school announced that shoe tying was now part of the curriculum, something interesting would probably happen. At first, parents might think it was strange.

“Wasn’t that something we used to do at home? Didn’t my dad look me in the eyes and hold my hands and teach me a song? That’s one of my favorite memories.”

A few years later, it would feel normal. Eventually, we might reach a point where young families genuinely believe teaching children to tie their shoes is something we need the school system for, reinforcing this idea that the extraordinarily ordinary work of raising children is increasingly something institutions are expected to do for us, rather than something families, caregivers, and communities have always shared.

Institutions shape our expectations.

That is why I think we should be careful about allowing early childhood care to slowly become understood as simply the first stage of the school system. It is not. Early childhood programs educate children, but they also nurture them. They create relationships, they build community, they partner with families in a more personal and informal way, and at their very best, they provide something much closer to an extension of family life than almost any other institution children will encounter.

We should absolutely build a system where every family can access that care. But we should also preserve a system where families get to choose what that care looks like. Before we conclude that the solution to our child care crisis is simply to build thousands of new seats, we need to understand why there are families searching for child care at the same time child care programs are reporting empty seats.

Maybe this moment is temporary. We all hope it is. Maybe enrollment patterns normalize next month. We all hope they do. Maybe the explanation turns out to be remarkably simple. But if it isn’t, the private and independent child care sector cannot afford to shrug and wait for the phones to start ringing again. We need better data. We need to understand how families actually search for care. We need to understand affordability, schedules, geography and age-specific demand. We need to understand whether families even know available programs exist. And independent providers may need to become much better at marketing ourselves not around what we want to say, but around what families are actually searching for and what they need from us.

The danger is not simply that some classrooms remain empty. The danger is that viable child care programs disappear while families are still desperately looking for them. By the time we realize those two groups simply failed to find one another, the infrastructure families needed may already be gone.

And what will replace it?