For families struggling to find affordable, reliable child care, the number of licensed slots in a community can be a misleading measure of how much care is actually available.
That was one of the central messages from a recent Institute for Research on Poverty webinar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which brought together researchers examining child care capacity, parental trade-offs and provider closures in Virginia, Massachusetts and Wisconsin.
Kate Miller-Bains, a research scientist at the University of Virginia, found that licensed capacity can substantially overstate the number of children providers can actually serve. Her research, based on a survey of nearly 2,000 Virginia child care providers, compared the number of children providers were authorized to serve with their “current capacity,” taking into account factors such as staffing and the ages of children enrolled.
The difference was striking. Centers had an average authorized capacity of 99 children but could actually serve only 72 — about 73% of their licensed capacity. In other words, relying on licensed capacity alone would suggest that roughly 27 slots existed at an average center when they were not actually available.
“The number of children that a provider can serve is so closely tied to staffing,” Miller-Bains said.
The gap was even larger among centers experiencing significant staffing challenges. Those centers operated at about 74% of their authorized capacity, compared with 83% among centers without staffing challenges. The discrepancies were also larger in communities with higher shares of people of color and among providers accepting child care subsidies.
The result is that conventional measures of child care “deserts” may underestimate the severity of shortages, particularly for some of the families and communities most in need.
Sarah Savage of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston approached the problem from the perspective of parents. Her research, based on interviews with 67 Massachusetts mothers, found that every mother in the study had made trade-offs among child care’s three competing dimensions: affordability, quality and availability.
Parents who preferred center-based care, for example, sometimes chose family child care because it was what they could find or afford. Others pieced together multiple arrangements, relied on relatives or negotiated with employers to make their child care situations work.
Those workarounds were not equally available to everyone — and sometimes came with significant consequences. Some mothers accumulated credit-card debt or postponed buying a home to pay for care. Others reduced their working hours or left the workforce altogether.
Savage emphasized that policymakers should look beyond the simple question of whether a family has child care.
“Let’s not be binary in terms of does a family have care or do they not have care?” she said. “But what does that care cost the family and what opportunities are there” to measure those trade-offs?
The supply problem is particularly acute for family child care providers, according to Jill Hoiting, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Research on Poverty.
In Wisconsin, licensed family child care capacity fell 51% between 2005 and 2019. In the state’s most rural counties, growth in center-based care did not make up for the loss. Overall, 71% of Wisconsin counties experienced a decline in total licensed child care capacity during that period.
Family child care is especially important because it can offer care for infants and toddlers, accommodate nontraditional work schedules, operate closer to families’ homes and generally cost less than center-based care.
Hoiting’s research also found that higher child care subsidy payments were associated with a lower likelihood that family child care providers would close. A provider receiving the average subsidy for infant and toddler care was about 29% less likely to close.
The research points toward a broader lesson: solving child care shortages requires attention not only to parents but also to the economic realities facing providers and workers.
Chrishana Lloyd, a researcher at Child Trends, argued that the system needs to be viewed as a public resource rather than something families must navigate privately.
“Slots mean nothing if they aren’t really where families need them,” Lloyd said. Access also depends on “the hours, the staffing, the language, the care supports” that make child care usable for families.
The researchers pointed to several potential approaches, including greater investment, more generous subsidies, better compensation for the child care workforce and coordination among state and local governments, schools, employers, philanthropy and other stakeholders.
Miller-Bains cited states such as New Mexico that have made significant investments in early childhood education, while cautioning that policies focused on only one piece of the system can produce unintended consequences elsewhere.
Savage said the fundamental challenge is that “the business model” for child care does not work under current constraints. Hoyting similarly called for investment that reflects “the true value that childcare does provide to our whole country.”
Lloyd offered perhaps the broadest prescription: bringing parents and educators into conversations that have too often excluded them and building “cross-sector coalitions” to treat early care and education as a public resource.