Rural America Doesn't Have a Child Care Problem. It Has an Infrastructure Problem.

For years, we have talked about the child care crisis largely in terms of supply.

By Airole Warden, Executive Director, Evergreen Start - Lancaster, NH

For years, we have talked about the child care crisis largely in terms of supply.

We need more child care slots. We need more infant care. We need more educators. We need more programs willing to open classrooms.

All of that is true.

But after years of working alongside child care directors in rural New Hampshire, I have become convinced that we are still missing a bigger piece of the problem.

We don't just have a child care shortage. We have an infrastructure problem.

I have watched incredibly committed people keep programs running through staffing shortages, rising expenses, complicated funding streams and growing administrative demands. I have watched communities rally around a child care center when it was struggling. I have seen funders, municipalities and employers step up because they understood exactly what losing that program would mean.

And I have also seen how close some programs can come to the edge even when classrooms are full and families desperately need the care.

That is the contradiction at the center of child care.

Demand can be enormous. Families can struggle to afford tuition. Educators can earn too little. And the program providing the care can still struggle to make the numbers work.

Quality alone does not keep a center open.

Neither does passion.

Eventually, there have to be strong financial systems, reliable staffing, good governance, HR support, compliance capacity, realistic budgets and someone with the time and expertise to actually manage all of it.

For many small child care programs, especially in rural communities, we have never built that layer.

Instead, we have asked individual programs to carry it themselves.

A child care director may be responsible for the quality of children's experiences, supervising staff, maintaining ratios, talking with families, hiring, enrollment, licensing, payroll, budgeting, grants, fundraising, facilities and whatever crisis walks through the door that morning.

We would not design most essential infrastructure this way.

Yet somehow, we have accepted it in child care.

The numbers increasingly show what providers have been telling us for years.

The New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute reported in June that the number of licensed child care providers statewide declined by 14 percent between 2017 and 2025. The number of home-based programs fell by 32 percent, while center-based programs declined by 10 percent. Meanwhile, the average combined annual price of center-based care for a family with an infant and a four-year-old reached nearly $30,000 in 2025

Those numbers are hard for families.

They are also a warning about the underlying business model.

Research released by the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire earlier this year found that labor accounts for roughly 70 percent of child care program expenses and that tuition revenue is often insufficient to cover the actual cost of operating a program.

In other words, this isn't simply a case of programs needing to run better businesses.

The math itself is difficult.

That difficulty becomes even more pronounced in rural communities.

When a community has five providers and loses one, there may be alternatives.

When a community has one provider and loses one, there is no child care system left.

That loss does not stay inside the walls of the center.

A nurse changes shifts. A teacher reduces hours. A manufacturing employee misses work. A family decides the commute no longer works. An employer already struggling to recruit has one more reason a candidate cannot take the job.

In northern New Hampshire, child care conversations very quickly become workforce conversations.

The New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute estimated last year that child care shortages may have cost New Hampshire businesses between $36 million and $56 million in lost productivity and other workforce-related costs in 2023 alone. Families may have lost an additional $114 million to $178 million in earnings.

That is economic infrastructure.

And nationally, the conversation is starting to shift in this direction.

In July, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation described child care as workforce infrastructure and highlighted states bringing businesses, community organizations and child care leaders together around solutions.

Just two weeks earlier, the Bipartisan Policy Center published an analysis of what happened when major semiconductor companies were asked to develop child care plans as part of federal CHIPS investments.

One of the most interesting lessons was not that employers were unwilling to help.

Many were.

The problem was that employers often did not have the relationships, technical expertise or local infrastructure necessary to turn that willingness into a functioning child care strategy. The report identified the need for trusted intermediaries capable of connecting employers, economic development, government and child care providers.

That should sound familiar to anyone who has tried to solve a rural systems problem.

Money matters. But money without infrastructure can only take us so far.

We can raise money for a new classroom and still have no one to staff it.

We can build a beautiful facility and discover that the operating model cannot sustain it.

We can create employer interest and then leave employers trying to navigate a complicated child care system they were never expected to understand.

We can make grants to individual programs while every small organization separately pays for accounting, HR, compliance systems, grant administration and other functions that could potentially be strengthened through shared regional capacity.

We keep financing pieces of the system and then wondering why the whole remains fragile.

This is part of why Evergreen Start was created.

Our work began with a fairly simple realization from years of working alongside rural providers: sustainable child care requires more than individual programs working harder.

It requires stronger systems around them.

That might mean shared financial management. HR and payroll support. Better data. Compliance systems. Coordinated fundraising. Workforce partnerships. Operational planning. Or an intermediary that can sit between child care providers, employers, government, philanthropy and economic development partners and help turn good intentions into something workable.

The goal is not to make locally rooted child care programs less local.

It is to give them access to infrastructure that small organizations often cannot reasonably build alone.

This is also not an argument for creating another layer of bureaucracy around child care.

It is the opposite.

It is an argument for asking whether every small child care program really needs to recreate the same administrative infrastructure by itself.

Rural communities already understand this concept.

We share emergency services. We build regional economic development organizations. We collaborate around health care, transportation, workforce development and other services because scale matters and because neighboring communities often share the same challenges.

Child care deserves the same kind of thinking.

And that means changing some of the questions we ask.

Of course we should continue asking how many new child care slots an investment will create.

But we should also ask:

Will those slots still exist five or ten years from now?

Who is supporting the organization operating them?

Is there a workforce to staff them?

Does the program have the financial and administrative capacity to survive a difficult year?

Are employers connected to the conversation?

Are we strengthening an existing provider before assuming we need to build something new?

And what infrastructure exists when the grant ends?

Those questions are not as exciting as cutting a ribbon on a new building.

But they may be far more important.

For rural America, the next generation of child care policy cannot simply be about opening more programs.

It has to be about creating the conditions that allow good programs to endure.

Because if we truly believe child care is infrastructure, we have to start building and sustaining it like infrastructure.