Jamee Herbert:
Taking care of our children is one of the most important responsibilities we'll ever have, but the childcare system is broken.

Wendy Doyle:
We need more childcare providers. We need to fix this broken system.

Simon Workman:
What they're doing is they're offering a service that without that service, the whole economy would fall apart.

Sonja Castañeda-Cudney:
Did it work for the health of our family? I don't know...

Jamee Herbert:
I'm Jamee Herbert, CEO of BridgeCare, an organization that helps make navigating the minefield of early care and education easier. I've spent years trying to understand why our childcare system feels impossible to work through.
Across the season, we're talking to parents, providers, and experts throughout the country to unpack how this system really works and why it breaks down. Every episode, we'll be looking at a different part of the equation from the economics to the workforce, to the policy barrier shaping what care looks like on the ground.
By the end of the season, you'll have a clearer picture of why America's childcare system has been set up to fail, and more importantly, what we can do to fix it. Why is it so hard to find childcare? To answer that, we need to understand the landscape families are navigating, and to understand why the system feels like such a maze.
I sat down with someone who's been studying it from every angle. Wendy Doyle has spent years examining how our childcare system impacts women, work, and the economy. She's the president and CEO of United WE, an organization that works to break down barriers to women's economic growth and leadership. She tells us why it's so hard to open and run a childcare business.

Wendy Doyle:
There's several things, but a pinpoint really starts to align around the licensing regulation. Which we need to do to keep our children healthy and safe, that's priority, but the red tape around the childcare really created a problem. I think the second key significant issue is workforce. And we're seeing that across the board in childcare. It's because the cost of care is so expensive, we can't afford to pay our childcare workers to be able to with a livable wage in a lot of circumstances.
So therefore, this is not an attractive industry for a lot of people to gravitate toward. They can make more money and have healthcare benefits in other industries. So I think healthcare, the cost of healthcare, the lack of healthcare offered to our childcare workers, coupled with the red tape and the licensing regulation, certainly as to underscore health and safety is critical, but so many red hoops, so many hoops to jump through creates significant challenge for this industry.

Simon Workman:
It's a system of non-systems, right? It's this sort of weird system that is a public good, but it's privately operated.

Jamee Herbert:
Simon Workman is the co-founder and principal of prenatal to five fiscal strategies. A nonprofit focused on addressing the imbalances in childcare for children prenatal to five. His perspective on childcare is focused on cost modeling.

Simon Workman:
You can sort of organize public schools a bit better because they all sort of fall under this sort of school district or a department or something. Whereas we have all of these hundreds of thousands of private childcare providers, but what they're doing is they're offering a service that without that service, the whole economy would fall apart, and the whole sort of structure of our society would fall apart. And so what that means is there's all these tensions in the system that we just keep finding where you've got this system that says, okay, it's a private system.
So parents are the consumers and they're out there and they're going to purchase care and it's going to work as a private market. But the reality is that parents can't afford what it would actually cost to really provide high quality childcare. So you have this mismatch between the consumer in this case of the parent, but they're not buying a car or buying a cup of coffee.
They're buying childcare for their child and that's so important and you want the highest quality, but what is highest quality? What is important to you? You can have high quality and still underpay the workforce. So the whole sort of incentive structure within this system of is really going the wrong way. There's just so many pieces of the system that is so complex that this disparate nature of having all these private providers over there, it just doesn't work as a system, even though it has to work as a system to be efficient.

Jamee Herbert:
Wendy agrees.

Wendy Doyle:
There are multiple departments, multiple divisions within a state that have touched childcare. So you can think you can go to Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, I'm using that as an example. It varies by state, so it's not the same department, but it could be you start there, then you got to go to the health and human services, and then you go to the health, mental health. It touches so many different departments. It's not one place to go. And that's another reason that you're seeing ... Currently, there are 12 states in our country that have an office of early childhood because they're trying to centralize instead of having it in multiple departments. In the state of California, it's four different departments that you have to go to.

Jamee Herbert:
You've become this kind of unique wealth of knowledge on this topic. Would it be possible for you to just walk me through a sample journey of like, I'm a person who decides I like children, I want to do this. What does that look like?

Wendy Doyle:
So I'll give an example of a childcare provider and let's pick a city, Garden City, Kansas. And the first thing that I would do, I'd have an interest in this is you need to figure out a location. And in some examples, a lot of providers think, hey, I've got a home. I can just open up my home to be able to bring kids in, and this could be really easy to do. The first place you would do is you would call the state to understand what the state licensing regulations are. There is an application process, so you would fill out the application, submit that. But what you may not understand is there could be some planning and zoning regulations that may prohibit you from actually opening your home to be able to provide childcare there. So may not know that. That could come later.
You get the application at the state level filled out, you receive the certification, you do need to have a background check. So once that's completed, then more than likely there will be a site visit to make sure that your location is safe. That would most likely be at the state level, but it depends on state by state what the in home provider requirements are. So it's not a one-stop shop per state.

Jamee Herbert:
How long does that usually take to happen too?

Wendy Doyle:
We have heard that it can happen in 60 days. We have heard the barrier could be a year.

Jamee Herbert:
Wow.

Wendy Doyle:
There are fees at every level of government. So there is a cost, and that's something that we're really working on to look at, can we streamline the licensing regulation, the requirements, and the fee structure? Every jurisdiction is a different fee. So it's not the same fee across all cities. It's not the same fee across all counties. State has the standard. But as you're talking about, as we're talking through this, just think about how complex this is to even fill out the application, get the license to actually start the business. We're not even into the care, the paperwork, the education component. This is just putting some of the basic pieces together. So I think, Jamie, that's the key point here that we want to make. It's burdensome. And when you don't have anyone that's helping you navigate the process and you're trying to figure out this yourself, you're unclear of where to go and what to do.

Jamee Herbert:
The thing that stood out to me most talking to Wendy was that the things that she is talking about that create barriers and time delays aren't intentional. They're often accidental parts of the system that are legacy policies from decades ago, or things that maybe administrators don't even realize are happening, like 60-day delays to getting licensed or up to a year. These are parts of the system that maybe are going unrecognized, but they are not there intentionally for the safety of children or to better the quality of care. And so to me, that's in a way exciting because it means that probably no one is wanting to keep it there. We just have to raise awareness like Wendy's organization is doing and help the people who can make the change see the change that's needed.

Sonja Castañeda-Cudney:
Anytime I would open up any websites about childcare or how could I apply for what things were available to families in Los Angeles area, what we qualified, what our threshold ... Everything was so overwhelming.

Jamee Herbert:
This is Sonja Castañeda-Cudney, a parent of three in Los Angeles, California. Her children are school age now, but it was not long ago that she and her husband, Daniel, struggled to find accessible childcare.

Sonja Castañeda-Cudney:
I didn't have the energy to really do it. I would get so overwhelmed. I was working, I was trying to manage our household. I was struggling at that time also with some perinatal mental health issues due to the traumatic birth of my daughter and the aftermath of that and losing our other daughter, Lucia. So I think that every time I would try to face this daunting task of finding the absolute best childcare that you could find in LA, it does feel like there's this pressure to find the best thing that is going to give your child all of this enrichment and is going to be affordable and is going to get them into the best school. It just feels very overwhelming.
And those things are not necessarily real stressors, but they felt like they were just kind of piling on. And anybody you talked to was also considering all of these things at the same time. I wasn't really able to do it.

Jamee Herbert:
Underpinning all of this is a system where parents are struggling to afford childcare and providers are struggling to stay open and provide it.

Simon Workman:
As a provider, you're incentivized to make the cheapest product available, right, to be able to fill your slots. But the cheapest product available means you're not paying your teachers very well. And even the programs that are paying their teachers better, it's still not anywhere near at the level it needs to be, which you then need to this high turnover, et cetera, et cetera. So there's just so many pieces of the system that is so complex that this disparate nature of having all these private providers over there, it just doesn't work as a system, even though it has to work as a system to be efficient.
The majority of providers in this country serve less than 50 kids, right? They are small mom and pop, small businesses, and they are not making big bucks, right? And I think breaking down where the money goes, like yes, you might be paying $2,000 a month for infant care, but one of the things we do a lot of is showing people, where does that money go? When you say, okay, you've got eight kids in the classroom and then you've got to pay benefits and salaries and insurance and food and all these things, people don't realize just where that goes. When you break it down to an hourly basis, suddenly you're like, oh yeah, for my 40 hours a week, it's costing this amount per hour and that's got to cover all those expenses.

Jamee Herbert:
Rising costs create a domino effect across people's lives with significant consequences.

Sonja Castañeda-Cudney:
You do kind of get a lot of different households that don't necessarily have a traditional nine to five schedule and who are really trying to patch work together care while also working. We had taken a huge pay cut. For me to take the job that I took, it did come with really great benefits for our family, but as far as the money that was coming in, we had a much tighter budget after I took that job and because Daniel wasn't able to work, so really we became a one income household on a very limited budget. And what did work for us was that Daniel would be the primary child caretaker. Did it work for the health of our family? I don't know.

Jamee Herbert:
Simon sees how difficult it is for both parents and providers.

Simon Workman:
It's that sort of analogy of the duck, right? That's like swimming across nicely at the top, but underneath it's going crazy. Underneath those flappers that are going is the provider making it work with their scarce resources, the director covering a classroom for half the day because someone called out sick and there's no coverage. And it's the parents who are scrambling under the surface to take their three children to three different childcare programs because that's where they got them in, right? They've putting together a patchwork of care where grandparents are helping or aunts and uncles are helping because they can't afford care or they can't find care for overnight and they have to work overnight.
And so I think that's the thing of like, because the economy hasn't grown to a halt, people are like, "Well, it can't be as bad as you're saying." But a lot of this is about just let's make it a little bit easier for people. Let's make it a little bit easier for families. Let's make it a little bit easier for providers, right? Yes, there's some great big goals of what we could do to make this a better system, but there's also a lot of interim steps before that that would just make this a lot easier for a lot of the people that are taking on a lot of the burden in this system right now.

Jamee Herbert:
Simon's right. There are some big steps we need to take to make the system better, and it won't be a simple process to get there, but Sonya's experience from her own childhood shows what can happen when people advocate for better and we collectively value childcare.

Sonja Castañeda-Cudney:
My mom had me when she was 19 and she started, at the university, she went to UW Madison. She actually petitioned to have all of the students pay a $2 student fee at UW Madison that subsidized childcare for students at UW Madison. And then she ended up running the daycare that was on campus for some years. And so I went to daycare on campus while my mom was in school. And so I came up during that. I came up with that as my experience and I loved my experience as a child.

Jamee Herbert:
The good news is there's hope. In 2022, New Mexico expanded childcare assistance to the highest income threshold in the country. In 2025, they removed that threshold altogether and became the very first state to offer universal childcare. This could save all families an average of $12,000 a year. The rollout hasn't been without its own issues, but many are looking at it as a proof point that universal childcare is in fact possible in the United States, but it didn't happen overnight.

Wendy Doyle:
That was a long game for that state. They have been diligent and prioritized it and it's been 10 to 12 years in the making. So we cannot not stop thinking about this, that we can get to a model like a New Mexico model. We cannot take our eye off of this and we can't be another 10 to 12 years living this way. That's why you see, there is lots of innovation, there's lots of ideas around this, but it's not going to go away and we need it.

Simon Workman:
New Mexico has this land grant permanent trust fund, and they're lucky they have money from oil and gas revenues that they're putting in there, but they put it into this and then they're using the dividends from that to fund childcare. And that's been a huge thing because that is growing. You can project what the growth of that is. You can say, yes, we don't need all of that money in year one because we're building the system, but as we're building towards the universal childcare model and a universal pre-K model and we're paying people more, you know that actually in year five, you are going to need everything that's in there.

Jamee Herbert:
While what happened in New Mexico is incredibly exciting, and again, a huge cultural transformational moment to say that we have passed universal childcare. It is yet to be seen how it gets rolled out and the devil is in the details for sure. And making sure that we not only make care affordable for families, but in doing so, we also make sure we care for our providers, that we pay them adequately, that we value their staff as educators, as we do in the K-12 system, that we have the right systems to implement all of that and make it accessible. A little later in the season, we'll talk about the example of Connecticut who is also just starting their journey toward expanding access to care and making childcare more affordable and the way that they have considered all of those aspects upfront.

Wendy Doyle:
In town hall settings where we're really listening firsthand to women in both metropolitan and rural communities, that there are couples out there that want to start a family. They want to start a family. They want that more than anything. But because they know they can't get childcare, they are putting that on hold. And that to me is, we're in the United States of America, that to me is a sad moment to be thinking that people can't have what they want because we can't solve the childcare challenge. And we have to do better.

Jamee Herbert:
While there are pockets of hope, this journey is only just beginning. Across this series, we are uncovering every piece of this puzzle. Next week, we follow the money. How is childcare funded in America and why are parents and childcare providers both struggling financially?

Benu Chhabra:
It's just me and my husband. When there are no kids, we don't even turn the AC on.

Jamee Herbert:
We can only fix the system if we first understand why and where it's broken. So subscribe and share this podcast with others who are navigating the system too. And go to getbridgecare.com if you want to learn more about what can be done to help families access high-quality, affordable childcare. The link is in the show description.