What If Child Care Were a Right, Not a Benefit?

Zoe Shaheen didn’t anticipate sending her son to an early care and education program. But when she saw how well he responded to other adults and children, she and her husband opted to send him for 12 hours a week to a child care program in southern Vermont. Then, in the spring of 2025, her husband lost his government job, and the cost of the extra child care seemed too much.

Except the director of her son’s preschool program, Alyson Grzyb, told Shaheen that she and her husband would likely qualify for financial assistance under Vermont’s Act 76, which provided child care subsidies to families up to 575% of the federal poverty line, or around $157,000 for a family of three. Shaheen knew about the subsidized child care programs, but she didn’t expect her family to qualify. They did, and all of their child care costs would now be covered by the state.

Shaheen acknowledges that had the state’s system of child care support included all families, the way Vermont’s Universal Prekindergarten program works for four-year-olds (for a minimum of 10 hours a week), then she would have known to apply. As more states and localities provide support for child care and early education – including the nation’s first universal and quasi-universal systems coming online in the past few years – the data suggests that universality may be a better way forward. It can capture a larger population, including more low- and moderate-income families, while both streamlining the experience of receiving support and creating a durable political constituency.

Indeed, despite child care subsidies in some states being expanded to middle- and high-income populations, families like the Shaheens have self-excluded because they believe themselves to be ineligible. Some of those families had been paying headache-inducing child care bills for years despite being one form away from receiving support. In Vermont, state data shows that since Act 76 came into effect in 2024, there has been a steady rise in enrollment among families that were already eligible at the pre-Act 76 threshold of 350% of the federal poverty line, or $95,600 for a family of three. In New Mexico, which announced universal free child care coverage last fall, this is playing out even more dramatically. Between November 1, 2025 and the end of March 2026, there was a 70% jump in enrollment for child care aid: the state went from enrolling around 26,000 kids to roughly 44,000 kids. More than half of the newly enrolled families – 56%– were already eligible under the income threshold that existed since 2023.

The Perils of Means-Testing

Child care subsidies, for decades, have existed for families based on financial need. Unlike K-12 education, which can be accessed by anyone on the income spectrum, the few child care support policies that our country has are designed to exclude those families who ostensibly have the means to pay full freight. But means-testing a program has inherent flaws. By putting in place an income threshold, and then having would-be participants prove that their means put them below it in order to qualify, it instantly creates cracks for families to fall through. Middle-class families often think the offering isn’t for them, while working-class families are frequently forced to jump through onerous hoops in order to prove they are eligible—and then consistently send information to the government to prove they remain eligible. Journalist Annie Lowrey has described this burden as the “time tax” in her recent book of the same name. She argued that the time tax “increases inequality, wastes money, diminishes public health, erodes political participation, degrades civic trust, and allows politicians to hide their policy goals behind reams of paperwork.”

Much of Lowrey’s description applies to America’s meager child care aid. The nation’s child care policies have been means-tested for decades, tied strongly to a welfare-to-work framework. That wasn’t always a given. During the debate around the 1971 Comprehensive Child Development Act, which famously passed Congress with bipartisan support only to reach its fate at the end of President Nixon’s veto pen, there was an ongoing clash as to whether the benefit should be designed to serve the most needy or to serve all children more broadly. One version of the legislation stated that child care services “should be available as a matter of right to all children regardless of economic, social, and family background.”

Instead, getting child care subsidies in most states requires wading through a morass of bureaucracy. The Missouri Independent reported of one single mother that, “getting the assistance took nearly eight months, as she had to apply over and over again, sit on the phone for hours, and cover the full cost of daycare for her newborn and two toddlers. She needed to take a day off work last month to spend three hours on hold, then speak for two hours with a Department of Social Services staff member, to finally get approved for assistance.” And even that can be a positive outcome compared to families that sit for years on waitlists, sometimes getting an offer of support only after their child has aged into the (universal) public school system.

Acting as ‘Subsidy Ambassadors’

Anne Audy knew she’d have to ask again. Audy, who runs a registered family child care in Addison County, Vermont, still had several families that hadn’t applied for one of the child care subsidies. This time, Audy had another incentive to offer: she was part of a pilot program to find out why families weren’t signing up for the child care benefits provided under Vermont’s Act 76. If the families would sign up and find out they didn’t qualify, then they would receive a scholarship under the pilot program.

For Audy, having more Vermont families sign up would be beneficial for her business: the state paid more for children on subsidy than she charged for kids who were private pay. She’d long made affordability one of the pillars of her child care work, and she was used to keeping her rates low so families could afford them. But Act 76 had upended the way child care was paid for in Vermont: more families could qualify for subsidies, if only they could be convinced to apply. “It was pulling teeth to get the parents to move forward with their application,” she said.

In a world where parents have been trained to think of child care support as means-tested welfare, child care administrators are forced to add “subsidy ambassadors” to their many, many roles.

In a 2024 interview, Christina Goodwin, then director of Pine Forest Children’s Center in Burlington, similarly described the lengths she and her team went to encourage families to apply for subsidies when the Act 76 program began. They hung Excel charts with income tiers highlighted and bulletin boards with detailed steps on how to apply. They even pulled families aside to describe the program—how and why it was different from the free meals food program —and explain if they applied, the family’s tuition bill would go down but the money Pine Forest would receive would go up.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to Vermont. When New Mexico announced its shift to universal child care, it stunned Sondra Carpenter, director at the Christina Kent Early Childhood Center in Albuquerque. She approached families about applying for subsidies and was surprised that several said no, preferring to pay privately rather than accept a subsidy from the state. “We respect their individual preferences. We encourage them to apply. We certainly aren’t going to make a family feel one way or another.”

The Promise of Universality

Now, to the immense credit of the states that have pioneered such programs, we are beginning to see what universality backed by robust public funding can do in child care.

The way universal child care shows up in family’s lives will look different in lower- and higher-income households, but the common thread is that the service gives households more freedom. A recent paper by Arizona State University economist Chris Herbst found that full-time employment among New Mexico mothers with less education jumped by 23% – representing the removal of the barrier of unaffordable child care – whereas highly-educated mothers were more likely to move from full-time work to part-time work and appear to have invested instead in further education and time within the household.

There is a mindset shift undergirding these actions: Treating child care as a universal service means seeing care and learning environments as a public rights that benefit all.

Creating universal programs that are designed for all citizens can make them more sustainable and less subject to political budget cuts. Lowrey makes the case in The Time Tax that the programs designed to serve the neediest people, such as those who need food assistance, are also the most burdensome. By contrast, Social Security is sent directly to families. Medicare has automatic enrollment, and school districts will hold Kindergarten fairs to proactively reach families.

Denver provides an example of what cultivating a broad constituency can do. Through the Denver Preschool Program (DPP), all Denver families are eligible for a tuition credit to support early care and learning for four-year-olds. DPP is what is considered a “targeted universal” program: every family can get support, but the level of assistance varies based on income. In the 2024-25 school year, the average credit was $518 a month, with lower-income families often receiving free care and the highest-income families getting a minimum credit of $36 to $53 per month. The application process is straightforward, and DPP is rated highly by parents for its customer service.

The program is authorized by a .12% sales tax, and passed in 2006 by a single-point margin after twice failing. But then the program launched and families witnessed the benefits of quality early care and education firsthand. Since families at all income levels could access it, the program evolved into being perceived as a public right, not welfare for Denver’s poorest citizens. Support grew: eight years after its initial authorization, in 2014, Denver voted to increase the tax to .15%, with the measure passing by 10 points. In 2023, voters made the DPP tax permanent by an astounding 56-point margin.

Similarly, in New Mexico, one of the first actions Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham took in laying the groundwork for universal child care in the state was creating a standalone Early Childhood Education and Care Department, which would manage child care assistance in the state. Previously, child care assistance had been part of the state’s Children, Youth, and Families Department, the same agency that handled foster care, child abuse and neglect, and juvenile justice services. In doing so, she both pragmatically and philosophically made the statement that early childhood education and care – like the K-12 system – is a positive and desirable social good.

Back in Vermont, child care provider Anne Audry still contends with means-test child care support. A family turned in their subsidy application at 8 p.m. the day it was due for the pilot program, and Audy herself called to make sure it could go through. Two other families said they’d apply, but balked at the paperwork. Audy did manage to convince a family to apply for the subsidy, even though they assumed they’d be denied, only to find out that – surprise! – they’d been eligible this whole time. “They’ve been thankful for the additional funds,” Audy says. It’s the word “subsidy” that creates such division, she adds. “It has a negative connotation, a lot of parents say ‘I don’t need government support,’ ‘I don’t need welfare.’”

In the United States, most of the most inclusive and politically resilient programs and services are those that have surmounted the “I don’t need welfare” connotation and serve people regardless of income: the public education system, military, libraries, fire departments, Social Security, Medicare, to name a few. Child care is now on contested ground between means-testing and universality. History and the emerging experience tells us the latter choice will create a far firmer foundation.