Benu Chhabra: Child care is essential. It needs to be seen. It needs to be heard.

Wendy Doyle: We can't be another 10 to 12 years living this way.

Rep. Kate Farrar: I'm so excited for educators to feel like they're being heard.

Jamee Herbert: This is the final episode of Child Care Matters: Built to Break. Today, we aren't going to do a deep dive into what's broken. We've already covered it in all the seven episodes up until now. Today, we take a look at our series and we ask, what have we learned and where do we go from here?

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 child care system feels impossible to work through. Across this season, we've talked with families, providers, and experts across the country to unpack how this system really works and why it breaks down, and now we're here. We've heard the problem from every angle, from funding to policies to the day-to-day struggles of parents and providers. Today, we look at the major takeaways from this series and what has to happen next if we want to fix child care in Americ. For the final time this season, this is Child Care Matters: Built to Break.

One thing that's become clear over the season is that our child care system isn't functioning like it needs to. Families struggle to find and pay for child care, but providers are barely scraping a living and getting burnt out in the process. You might think the solution is just that we need to better fund the entire child care system, and we do, but it isn't just that simple. Simon Workman is an expert in the field and a working parent himself. He's helped us understand the financing and structural components of the child care system. I've appreciated his insight into how disconnected the parts of the system are and why fixing one piece at a time will never be enough.

Simon Workman: If one day we ever get a big influx of money for this system, when this happened before and there was the idea of maybe getting more money from the federal government, a lot of states were not prepared to know how to spend that money if they got that, right?

Jamee Herbert: As Simon has said, this is a system of non-systems, a public good that has been left to operate like a private market, and the friction that creates has accumulated over decades. One of the biggest points of friction is felt by hardworking providers. They pay the price for the inefficiencies and fragmentation. Remember Benu Chhabra? She's a family child care educator who we spoke to throughout the series.

Benu Chhabra: As a family child care educator, you have to be present in your program for 80% of the time. And many of us, including myself, had health issues where we couldn't even leave the program to go even for a regular checkup. I mean, we work Monday through Friday, and there are many of us work almost seven days a week, and you tell me that is there any doctor open after we get off?

Jamee Herbert: Benu highlighted all the sacrifices the providers make to care and educate children day in and day out. She embodies the financial and physical cost hundreds of thousands of providers are paying nationwide to keep their doors open. Erica Phillips, executive director of the National Association for Family Child Care, echoes Benu's sentiments.

Erica Phillips: These are also not easy jobs. You are picking up children, you're having to go outside, you're having to monitor children constantly, and so it can take a toll, a physical toll on providers. I was just talking to a family child care educator who was on her knee replacement for her second knee, and she was wondering how long she would be able to do this as she gets older and doing this work.

Jamee Herbert: It's worth underlining again what she says here. This is long physical work that requires their full attention every minute of every day, and it's an essential service without which our economy would come to a standstill. That physical toll and the financial toll are very much linked. A 2025 poll from Stanford Center of Early Childhood found that more than half of child care providers are experiencing food insecurity, and the physical toll of their job makes it even harder to justify staying in the field for such low pay.

Erica Phillips: From our last survey, 30% reported making between $7 to $10 an hour and 50% below $15 an hour. So the majority are making below $15 an hour. There unfortunately are people making as low as $2, $3, $4, $5 an hour.

Jamee Herbert: Erica highlighted the pay problem for us this season, but I want to sit with what it actually means for the people doing this work every day. According to UC Berkeley's Child Care Research Center, the median wage for a child care provider nationally is $13.07 an hour. That ranges from $10.60 in Louisiana to $18.23 in D.C. To put that into perspective, a new associate hired at Walmart in 2025 would earn more than that. These are not living wages and the consequences are real. Nearly half of all child care providers are relying on public assistance, like Medicaid or food stamps, while working full-time or more. When educators can't afford to stay in the field, providers can't keep their doors open, and when providers can't keep their doors open, families are left without options. Those aren't just statistics, they're real families. Sonja Castaneda-Cudney is one of them. She spent years trying to navigate a system that was never designed to be easy to navigate.

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 think that every time I would try to face this daunting task of finding the absolute best child care 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. It 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: Sadly, the stories I heard this season are not very new to me. I've heard all kinds of different versions of the same stories across the country, and I've myself experienced them. I actually started this work before I had kids, and for me, I was trying to avoid the pressure to leave my career when I did have kids. I was very uniquely looking far into the future at what my challenges might be and wanting to solve them for myself and for others. And also, unfortunately, now that I'm a mom and a CEO, I too struggle with the same challenges that others have around affordability, around managing schedules, and just this incredible burden placed on families. What's really surprising and also just shows how broken the system is is that even the experts, the people we've heard from, myself, Simon, Sarah, we all struggle with the same challenges that everyone does because the system is broken and just knowing about it doesn't help you navigate it any easier.

Despite all the challenges we've dug into this season, there are some bright spots. We've seen some great examples of hope throughout the season in places like Connecticut, New York, and Colorado, where child care is being prioritized by policymakers. These aren't just feel-good stories. They are examples of concrete fixes to structural problems. Representative Kate Farrar is a great example of a state rep deeply committed to sustainable long-term change for families and providers in Connecticut, and as a Connecticut-native, I left our conversation genuinely hopeful.

Rep. Kate Farrar: In Connecticut, one of the geneses for bringing people together in a new way really was the pandemic. I know in other states across the country, it brought to life the importance of child care and it really highlighted in that moment of emergency how essential child care was. And in Connecticut, out of the pandemic, our Office of Early Childhood and our governor's office and legislators took the lead on establishing a Blue Ribbon Commission on child care, and that's where that consensus really started to grow.

Jamee Herbert: One of the aspects that their vision highlighted was the idea of having one front door for families, one place to access information about available openings, find providers, and apply for assistance. That single point of entry is a foundational starting point for families. This is something that any state could do. The next replicable fix is recommitting to accurate data, making sure policymakers have clear visibility into reliable information so they can make critical decisions based on facts rather than assumptions or just a hunch. Simon has seen what happens when that data doesn't exist and he's seen it play out state-after-state.

Simon Workman: You ask a state, "Tell me how many child care slots you have," and they often can't answer the question. They might be able to tell you how many subsidy slots they pay for and they might tell you how many licensed providers they have, but they don't even necessarily know, within those licensed providers, the age of kids that can be served, how many are full or not, right? There's such a dearth of data because it's been so tied to whether you take public funds or not, but because public funds are not that sufficient, a lot of providers don't take public funds, and so there's just this black box of people don't have any information.

Jamee Herbert: And yet, there are leaders proving it doesn't have to be that way. Colorado's chief product officer, Sabina Andersson, is one of them. Her focus isn't just on collecting better data. It's on building the kind of teams and institutional mindset that can actually sustain it.

Sabina Andersson: The product managers in general are helping to kind of connect what do we have to do in terms of legislative mandate, but also what do we connect in terms of our CDC strategy, the technology that we have available, and connecting all of that to user outcomes and user feedback and making sure that we are building the right things and not just building things.

Jamee Herbert: And it's working. Colorado went from 27th to third in the country for preschool enrollment in less than two years. One of the key drivers for this change was the passing of Proposition II, the 2023 measure that created the universal preschool fund through excess tobacco and nicotine tax revenue. They wasted no time implementing it through a combination of visionary leadership, purpose-built technology, and the political will to do what's best for young children.

Sabina Andersson: I think that data-driven approaches in terms of how we make decisions is a good way for us to kind of keep ourself honest about are we actually driving things in an equitable way for us to be able to define what is equity and how do we have data to support that to make the right decisions towards it. That is a responsibility of people who work in government.

Jamee Herbert: A positive we touched on throughout this series is the sense of community fostered by child care providers. Benu shared with us one way that her fellow child care providers are supporting one another professionally, and until we address the big systemic challenges in our child care system, community-focused organizing like this will continue to be a lifeline for many providers and families.

Benu Chhabra: Tuesday Talks is a support group where all the educators feel safe coming in in person and talking about what are their struggles. Sometimes, they may not be able to open in front of the other agencies or something where they feel comfortable. If I'm in other family child care educator's shoe, I can feel very comfortable sharing, "Oh, I'm having this struggle," whether it's with my employee or whether it's with the licensing, that you can talk about it. And then, yes, as a network, we can go up and ask for advocate, we're suffering and how can we find help for that person that educators that need. So it's very safe. We get a lot of feedback on our Tuesday Talks. It's been going over almost 12, 14 years now.

Jamee Herbert: Despite all of that, we still have a very far away to go. Sarah Rittling is the CEO of the First Five Years Fund, and she raises an important point not often connected with fixing the child care system in the US.

Sarah Rittling: If we're talking about the dream world, right, or what we would want to see, you'd have paid leave. It relieves a lot of the tension that exists in our child care system, which is the expense, the very good, reasoned, valid, acceptable expense of caring for the littlest, littlest, littlest ones, but it's costly. If they're able and parents are able to have the option to be home, it creates a big sigh of relief on a system that's already overtaxed.

Jamee Herbert: We've talked about the economic cost of this system throughout the season, the $172 billion in lost productivity in the US due to insufficient child care. We know that accessible, affordable, high-quality early care and education is the backbone of a healthy economy, and the numbers are staggering.

Simon Workman: There's a very well-known economist, James, developed something called the Heckman Curve, and it really looks at what is the return on investment in the long term, and that ranges from about $7 for every dollar invested around pre-K to more like $13 return for every dollar invested if you have a fully robust zero to five system, right? Children who have access to high-quality early childhood environments are less likely to go through the juvenile justice system, are more likely to graduate from high school, more likely to graduate from college, more likely to have higher paid jobs, and there's a tax impact of that of then they have higher paying jobs that put more money into the economy.

Jamee Herbert: Since we have a firm understanding of the economic impacts, Simon has clear ideas about where we should start when looking at the future of public funding for child care in the US.

Simon Workman: If I could redesign the funding system tomorrow, the first change I would make would be to set the public funding rates based on the cost of quality, actually figure out what it actually is, the true cost ,and set the rates at that level. Also, make it not a per child amount, make it a fund classrooms, right? Fund programs or fund classrooms and build some trust in this system, where it says, "We trust that the directors, the teachers, the educators know the best way to run their program." You have some safety guidelines in there, but get them the money. Yes, figure out ways to be accountable, but get them the money and let them run their business, run it as a business. And if you have that stable and sufficient funding, we'd have a system that actually responded to the needs that were out there.

Jamee Herbert: We dug into this in episode six. Right now, the cost of care isn't set by what it costs to deliver care. It's set at the rate families can afford to pay, how much the federal government is funding child care subsidies, and where states are setting subsidy rates. None of those numbers reflect the true cost of delivering care, let alone the cost of delivering care with quality. But a handful of states are starting to flip that logic. For pre-K, Alabama funds the classroom rather than by the seat, so program budgets don't change every time a child is sick or a family moves. It gives providers stability and allows them to plan for the long term.

I'll be honest, a lot of the changes we discussed this season require political action and prioritization that could take years, maybe decades. But if there's one thing that I think comes across clearly through this series, it's that there is a widespread desire for progress. And while there are many things we know need to change, we have incredible partners we work alongside every day who are making impactful and meaningful changes in communities. We're supporting state agencies running successful pre-K programs, building strong workforces alongside CCR&Rs, and re-imagining how providers navigate licensing from the very start. If you want to find out more about some of the innovation happening at every level of our system, I invite you to explore getbridgecare.com. The link is in the show description.

The economics matter, the policy matters, the data matters. But what I want to close our season with is a vision for a better future with what child care is supposed to feel like in a system that works. Sonja Castaneda-Cudney told us how she envisions a truly supportive child care.

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 child care 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. I always imagined that we would be able to access care centers that were made to support working families, and that was just not the case.

Rep. Kate Farrar: I'm so excited for parents to feel like they're finally being heard and that they can access the care for their kids that they deserve. I'm so excited for educators to feel like they're being heard and that they actually feel truly valued at the end of the day, that it's not just words, that they feel actually valued when it comes to what they're paid. And I'm just simply really excited for our kids to see that they have the most joyous and safe and educational learning opportunities that they deserve.

Jamee Herbert: But we're not going to get there without being loud about what needs to get fixed, finding ways to keep early education at the forefront of discussions at the local, state, and national levels, and advocating tirelessly for the children, families, and educators who serve them.

Benu Chhabra: I think within this past few years, we saw, like in my city, for example, we have seen that where our mayors or city council members, they come and we invite them. And this is why I encourage every educators, wherever you are, take that action, show up in your city meetings and talk to them, invite them, and this is how the changes are going to be made. We were the grand marshal for our parade, city parade in 2023. That's big, when they called us as an educator, and we led the parade. And I believe that's... Even if it's a small start, but then if you look at the bigger picture, that's a big impact and that's why. I was also part of the Grassroots Assembly in New Mexico, where I went door knocking. So we need to keep advocating.

Jamee Herbert: Wendy Doyle has spent years listening to families across this country in cities and in rural communities. What she heard makes clear exactly what's at stake if we don't get this right.

Wendy Doyle: We have heard time and time again in town hall settings where we're really listening firsthand to women in both metropolitan and rural communities, 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 child care, 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 child care challenge, and we have to do better.

Jamee Herbert: America's child care system wasn't built to last. It was built to break. It's a patchwork of disconnected funding streams, agencies and data silos built up over decades, and the families and providers caught inside it are paying the price. But this season has shown us that we know what the problems are. We have proof that better is possible. And if no one is defending the broken pieces, we can start to mend them. We're seeing in states nationwide that change is happening. The accidental nature of this dysfunction is, in a strange way, the most hopeful thing about it. At BridgeCare, fixing this system is our mission. We can only get there if enough people understand why and where it's broken. So share this podcast with others navigating it alongside you and visit getbridgecare.com to learn more. The link is in the show description.