The Delta Issue #106
The Case for Child Care Waitlists
Hi y’all, Jessica here.
Child care in America is in crisis.
The cost of care increased 29% between 2020 and 2024. Families routinely spend more on child care than they do on rent or a mortgage. The Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), the federal government’s primary program for helping low-income working families afford care, reaches only a fraction of the families who qualify. More than 400,000 children who need child care assistance are currently waiting to get it, triple the number just two years earlier.
There are a million reasons child care is so expensive and so hard to find in this country, and none has an easy fix. But there is one simple thing states could do right now to better understand—and start addressing—the problem: keep a waitlist.
The reality is that there isn’t enough federal child care subsidy funding to serve every family who qualifies. States can put more of their own dollars into early childhood, but even then, demand can outpace the resources available.
So when the money runs out, you should still be counting the families who need help. A waitlist tells you how many kids are still waiting and where the need is greatest. Yet, just 17 states maintain one.
Don’t mistake the absence of a waitlist for the absence of demand. A state can lower the income cutoff so fewer families are eligible to apply, make it harder for child care providers to accept subsidies, or even just stop processing applications. The waitlist may get shorter—or disappear altogether—but that doesn’t mean those families suddenly found affordable child care. They just stopped showing up in the state’s numbers.
As a state leader, it is your job to know how many families need assistance and can’t get it, where they live, and what it would take to serve them.
This week, we’re making the case for waitlists as a lever state leaders can use to understand unmet need, make smarter decisions about where to add seats, and make the case for more resources. Let’s get into it.
1️⃣ Know your unmet demand so you can make better choices.
If you want to make smart choices with limited child care dollars, you need to understand the demand.
In almost every other sector, demand helps determine supply. If a retailer sells out of a sweater and another 10,000 people want one, they don’t stop counting because they’ve run out. They use that information to figure out how many more sweaters to make.
In K-12, it’s not too different. When more students show up at school, we count them. State funding formulas are generally designed to respond to enrollment because the system needs to know how many students it is expected to serve and fund accordingly.
Early childhood doesn’t work that way, and that’s part of the problem. As we’ve written about before, birth-to-five isn’t really a system at all; it’s a patchwork of programs, funding streams, and providers. When there isn’t enough money to serve every family, states have to make hard choices: Who gets served? How much assistance do they receive? Which families or communities should be prioritized?
Those choices are happening whether you keep a waitlist or not. Without one, you’re just making some of the tradeoffs invisible.
A waitlist gives you a clearer picture of the families on the other side of those decisions: how many are still waiting, where they live, the ages of their kids, and, depending on the data collected, their income levels. State leaders can use that information to make better decisions about how to stretch the dollars they have and understand what additional resources would buy.
2️⃣ Know what you should invest in
Knowing how many kids need care is only part of the equation. You also need to know who those kids are and where they live.
Say your state gets funding to create 2,000 more child care seats. Where should they go? Do you need more infant and toddler care, or more options for school-age kids? Are some communities facing much longer waits than others? Are there groups of families your current investments are reaching well—and others you’re barely reaching at all?
Good waitlist data helps you answer those questions. If 500 kids are waiting in one community and 50 in another, that tells you something about where to add capacity. If most of the kids waiting are infants and toddlers, that tells you something about what kind of capacity you need to build.
We saw this firsthand in Louisiana. Our waitlist told us more than how many kids needed care statewide; it showed us where they lived. We could see which parishes had the greatest unmet need and use that information to guide where new resources went.
Child care dollars are too scarce to spread around blindly. When you get the opportunity to invest more, you should have the data to know where—and for whom—those dollars can do the most good.
3️⃣ Use your waitlist as a lever to get more funding
If you’re a state leader worried that a long waitlist makes you look bad, I’d encourage you to flip your thinking. A waitlist can be one of your strongest arguments for more child care funding.
There’s an understandable temptation not to put a number on a problem you don’t have the money to solve. Once you document that 5,000—or 10,000 or 20,000—kids need assistance and can’t get it, you have to grapple with what it would take to serve them. But that number can also be your leverage to do something about it.
It’s one thing to walk into a governor’s office or legislature and say, We need more money for child care. It’s another to say: We have 10,000 kids who qualify for assistance and can’t get it. Here’s where they live. Here’s what it would cost to serve them.
Now you have more than a general plea for funding. You have a specific problem, a price tag, and a clear case for what additional investment could accomplish.
Virginia offers a good example of how this can work. During the pandemic, federal relief dollars allowed the state to dramatically expand the number of children receiving child care assistance. When those temporary dollars started running out, state leaders faced a choice: take care away from families or find the money to keep serving them.
Virginia had data showing exactly how many families were receiving assistance, how many more were waiting, and how many could lose care when the federal funding disappeared. State leaders used those numbers to show policymakers what was at stake and make the case for the state funding needed to keep families in care.
They also used the data to make hard choices about how to stretch those dollars. Leaders adjusted family copays, balancing what families could afford with the goal of serving as many children as possible. With more resources and a strategy for making them go further, Virginia was able to add 2,440 child care subsidy slots in just one year.
Jenna Lawrence Conway and her team have continued using Virginia’s waitlist to understand demand and make decisions about where limited resources can go the furthest.
If you’re a state leader trying to expand child care access, take a page from Virginia. Don’t treat a long waitlist as evidence of failure. Use it to show what families need, make the case for more resources, and make smarter choices with the dollars you have.
Don’t wait for a mandate to start counting.
The child care crisis is colliding with a growing affordability crisis. Americans are struggling to pay for basics like food, housing, energy, and child care. Changes to SNAP, Medicaid, and other supports could squeeze household budgets even further, meaning more families may need help paying for care at exactly the same time public dollars are stretched thin, too.
When families can’t find or afford care, it doesn’t just create a child care problem. Parents cut back hours or leave jobs they need. Providers lose enrollment and struggle to stay open. Employers lose workers. Kids miss out on early learning that helps prepare them for school.
States need to see where that pressure is building before the problem gets worse. If you’re a state that wants to lead on early childhood, knowing how many families need help, where they are, and how that need is changing is part of what that looks like.
There may be a case for Washington requiring every state to keep a waitlist, but that’s a whole other can of worms for another day. In the meantime, state leaders shouldn’t need a federal mandate to know how many families they aren’t serving. Start counting now, and use what you learn to get more families into care.
Let’s Get Muddy
Searching for Your Next Home? Now You Can See Nearby Childcare Options. Redfin recently added nearby child care options to its home-search experience. If a real estate company sees the value in knowing where child care is available, states should certainly know.
Want to dig deeper on the hard choices states face when child care dollars are tight? Watch our webinar, Hard Choices After the Fiscal Cliff, which I hosted with Nasha Patel , Rebecca Ullrich , and Catherine Pozniak .
For more on what it takes to build a stronger birth-to-five system, check out these previous Deltas:
