The morning after Edythe Smith gave birth to her daughter, she got some bad news. State funding for a government program that helps low- and moderate-income families pay for child care had just been frozen in Syracuse, New York, where she lives.
Smith is a single parent who works full time from home as an auto claims insurance adjuster. When her maternity leave ended last fall, she had no choice but to return to work while continuing to care full time for an increasingly mobile — sometimes perilously curious — baby.
“It’s super disruptive to my job,” she said. And it became even more disruptive as the months wore on and the child wasn’t content anymore to spend much of the day confined to a playpen by her mother’s desk. At moments, Smith had to juggle intense work phone calls with keeping her daughter out of serious mischief.
“It’s really hard to excel at your job or find opportunities for promotion when your whole life is revolving around” a baby, Smith said.
Thousands of families across the country have found themselves in a similar situation. The number of children on state-run waitlists for child care subsidies nearly doubled between early 2024 and early 2025, with many lists continuing to grow throughout 2025, according to a May report from the National Women’s Law Center. That’s the largest year-to-year increase since the nonprofit group started compiling the data two decades ago.
An analysis from The Associated Press released earlier this month similarly found hundreds of thousands of children languishing on waitlists last spring in 23 states and Washington, D.C. In Georgia, New Jersey and South Carolina, some eligible families were turned away because of enrollment freezes, the AP found.
The child care assistance comes from a nearly 40-year-old federal funding stream called the Child Care and Development Block Grant. Currently around $12 billion in CCDBG money flows to states, which is matched by around $4 billion from the states and other sources. The funding is then distributed in the form of vouchers to parents or subsidies directly to their child care providers.
Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.
The record high waitlists have forced families across the country to turn to unregulated providers or suboptimal babysitters for care. They have left cash-strapped parents relying on food banks and other charities for basic necessities. And they have also made it difficult, if not impossible, for countless women to find and keep jobs — hindering their participation in the workforce as families’ need for stable income has only increased in the face of rising gas, grocery and other costs.
Starting in 2020, Congress appropriated $28 billion in emergency money to the program, but that extra funding expired in fall 2024. Some states have increased funding to try to fill the gap, but families’ need for child care assistance has only grown. Meanwhile, in some communities, fewer child care centers are accepting the subsidies because they don’t fully cover the cost of care, limiting the supply on multiple levels.
“There’s fewer resources and more need,” said Karen Schulman, senior director of state child care policy at the National Women’s Law Center, who authored the May report.
The assistance program may soon be facing even more financial pressure. In an action championed by Vice President JD Vance, the Trump administration is moving to redirect some of the funds to married couples with one stay-at-home parent, The New York Times reported earlier this month.
This shift in eligibility would create the only federal subsidy to pay parents to stay home with their children. But without more funding, such a change would make the long waitlists even longer for a program that already only serves about 1 in 7 eligible children, advocates say.
“This is the administration’s latest effort to force an outdated vision of the family on all Americans, including by making it harder for women to stay in the workforce,” said Amy Matsui, vice president for child care and income security for the National Women’s Law Center, in a statement.
Indeed, in interviews with over a half dozen mothers — several of them their family’s sole income earner — across four states this summer, they described the immense challenge of thriving at work while languishing on child care waitlists.
One Texas mother delayed her return to the workforce for years as she waited for her baby to make it off the waitlist. Another had to call out from her job in retail for a home goods store so often that she lived in fear of getting fired.
“At a time when families need to bring in income because they have formula and diapers to pay for, they can’t work,” said Beth Messersmith, senior director of MomsRising North Carolina, which advocates on issues affecting mothers, including child care. “It leads families to slip into poverty.”
Related: Child care crisis deepens as funding slashed for poor families
When Smith became pregnant, she assumed that her income level would qualify her for some form of child care subsidy. Paying out of pocket for child care wasn’t an option. Most quality centers in her neighborhood charge about $400 a week — twice the amount of her mortgage. “I could have looked for uncertified daycare opportunities where you pay someone very little,” she said. “But ethically and from a safety standpoint, it didn’t seem like it would work.”
As the months of her maternity leave wore on, Smith resigned herself to the prospect of returning to work with her infant still at home and by her side. It seemed sort of manageable until Smith’s daughter, Judy, began to crawl, and then toddle. And just as her daughter became more mobile, Smith got a promotion at work.
On top of the challenge of keeping Judy safe while training for her new role, Smith worried about her daughter missing out on socializing with other kids, and the kind of verbal interactions with teachers and peers that a quality child care center could provide. A developmental screening questionnaire Smith filled out last spring showed that Judy could use a little more support with her communication and language.
“There’s not a lot of opportunity now for her to engage with her peers,” Smith said. But “the minute she is around another child, she feels compelled to use her language.”
Smith muddled through by regularly extending her work day from 7 a.m. to midnight, to give her enough time to get her research and reports done. “During her nap time I’m like a bat out of hell trying to get as much done as I possibly can,” she said.
While Smith felt lucky throughout the winter and spring that she could juggle it all, she wasn’t exactly thriving.
“I’m happy with my salary and the small promotion that I got,” she said. “But the reality is that had she been in care I would have been able to apply for competitive promotions and fulfill them with confidence. Right now, I don’t question my job security, but I do question my ability to do my job as best I can.”
Like Smith, when Amie Stevens signed up for child care assistance in 2023, she thought she was being proactive. Her daughter was 5 months old, and Stevens, who lives in Austin, Texas, figured that she would be able to return to her career as a massage therapist by her daughter’s first birthday.
But getting off the waitlist would take close to 2 1/2 years.
The family had some income coming in from Stevens’ partner, but it wasn’t enough to cover all of the bills. They went on food stamps, and Stevens took some parenting classes from Catholic Charities to qualify for free diapers. She scoured phone apps for offers of gift cards in exchange for filling out surveys. And she turned to her parents in Iowa for some financial help. Meanwhile, Smith became pregnant with a second child.
“I was getting a little discouraged,” she said. “‘Am I ever going to go back to work?’ I thought I would have to wait until the kids went to kindergarten.”
Finally, earlier this year families in her county got word that the waitlist was starting to clear, largely due to a property tax increase to raise more funds for child care. Stevens then had 90 days to find a job. She found a part-time massage therapist opening at a local chiropractor office and picked up some extra hours doing office work to meet the minimum 25 hours per week necessary to keep the subsidy.
The income was critical, and Stevens was also happy to finally get out of the house more. “I love what I do,” she said. “It really doesn’t feel like a job if you like it.”
For Barbara Aranda, a single mother who also lives in Austin, staying out of the workforce wasn’t an option. She had tried to sign up for child care assistance two days after her youngest daughter, Mackenzie, was born.
Aranda couldn’t afford any centers without the subsidy, so she relied on a patchwork of babysitting support from her niece and others. But babysitters weren’t always available, so Aranda ended up calling out from her full-time job in retail a couple of times a week on average.
She didn’t get paid for days that she couldn’t show up, and as the months wore on, Aranda began to fear losing a job she’d held for over a decade.
With less money coming in, Aranda canceled her cable subscription and started visiting food pantries. But she still fell behind on car and rent payments, she said, and “there were times when we struggled to get enough food.”
When Mackenzie, now 3, finally came off the waitlist last February, Aranda enrolled her in child care as soon as she could. She stopped calling out from work except on the rare occasions Mackenzie is home sick. Her income increased. Yet she’s still trying to pay off the debt accrued during nearly three years waiting for a subsidy.
“If not for the wait, I would be in a different place financially now,” she said.
Related: The problem child care subsidies can’t solve: the shrinking provider pool
Even before waitlists surged in size, some child care voucher programs were designed in ways that can complicate life for working parents, according to advocates.
Taylor Moyer, a mother of three in Virginia Beach, Virginia, wanted to return to work when her oldest was still young. But she couldn’t apply for jobs if she didn’t have child care, and without a job she wasn’t eligible at the time for the state’s child care assistance program. “I felt like I couldn’t win,” she said.
Other states have strict income limits for recipients of child care vouchers, so families near the cutoff may be booted from the program if they get even a modest raise or additional hours. “There can be a benefits cliff where if you get a promotion, you lose your subsidy,” said Messersmith, the North Carolina advocate. “It makes it very tenuous for families.”
And untold numbers of eligible families never even apply, because they don’t know about the benefit or are daunted by the bureaucracy and the prospect of a long wait.
“There are (about) 100,000 kids on the waitlist in Texas,” said Kim Kofron, executive director of early childhood education at Children at Risk, a Texas nonprofit that advocates for children. “But we also know we’re serving only 17 percent of eligible families.”
In Syracuse, Smith finally got some good news at the end of June, nearly two months after her daughter’s first birthday. An influx of state funding meant that she and hundreds of other families in her county would finally come off the voucher waitlist. Even then, completing the final steps wasn’t easy. It took weeks of stressful back and forth to confirm that there was no father — Smith had used a donor — and, therefore, no other potential source of income to support her daughter.
But at the end of July, Judy at long last started at a nearby child care center. Smith no longer feels so overwhelmed each weekday as the work day begins. And her daughter, now 15 months, is thriving and loves playing with a 16-month-old buddy every day in care.
But Smith is still trying to make up for lost time, working late many evenings to do so. She estimates that it will take about a year of extended work days to feel at the top of her game at work again — about the same amount of time she spent on the waitlist. “That’s how far back it set me,” she said.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
This story about child care assistance was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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