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This week, my feed has been flooded with news about President Trump considering policies to address declining U.S. birth rates, including scholarships reserved for married parents and a “National Medal of Motherhood” for women with six or more children. 

But let’s be clear: You don’t get to tell women to have more children while refusing to build the systems we need to actually raise them. Because raising a child doesn’t start and stop with birth. It takes support and infrastructure.

One of the most critical pieces of that infrastructure? Child care. And not just any care: affordable, reliable, high-quality care that parents can actually access.

We’ve been talking a lot about how expensive child care is. But what we’re not talking about enough is something even more fundamental: how impossible it is to even find care in the first place.

Affordability and accessibility aren’t separate issues when it comes to child care — they’re two sides of the same broken system.

Over half of Americans now live in “child care deserts,” where the number of kids needing care drastically outpaces the number of available licensed providers. Some families are on waitlists for over a year. Others in rural communities have no options at all. Even when they can afford it, many parents can’t find a single open spot.

So, what happens? Moms quit their jobs. Parents delay having another child. Families go into debt.

If this feels like a system that wasn’t built to support families, it’s because it wasn’t. And if it feels like we’ve been fighting this same fight for generations that’s because we have.

Take a look at these two photos. They were taken in the exact same spot by New York City Hall 75 years apart:

In school, most of us didn’t get taught about that 1950 photograph shown above, or the story behind it. So to understand how little has truly changed, let’s start with a mini-history lesson.

Universal Child Care Isn’t a Dream — It’s a Memory

Those parents and kids in that photo were protesting about government funding for a child care program. During World War II, Congress passed the Lanham Act, the first and only national child care program in American history. It was designed to fund child care for kids whose mothers went to work during the war. (Yep, we all just collectively pictured Rosie the Riveter.)

Within a year of the Lanham Act’s passage, 130,000 kids were enrolled — and by the end of the war, the program had helped create day care facilities in nearly 400 communities across the country and provided care to nearly 600,000 children.

But after the war, the federal government stopped funding these child care centers. Some states continued to provide funding, recognizing how critical they had become to keeping the economy humming. Even those funds started to dry up by the end of the decade. And that’s why that crowd gathered in New York’s City Hill Park 75 years ago — to demand lawmakers see their needs.

For a brief window, we had a universal affordable child care program in America. The Lanham Act fundamentally changed the public perception of day care as something that could be good for all kids. It allowed millions of women to participate in the workforce. Hell, you could easily say it helped win the war.

Our lawmakers let that program fade out.

There were moments of hope in the intervening decades. In 1971, Congress passed a bipartisan bill to create a multibillion-dollar child care system to alleviate burdens on working parents — President Nixon vetoed it. The Child Care and Development Block Grant was created in 1990, focused on subsidizing care for lower-income families. But the program has been so severely underfunded that only 14% of eligible families receive assistance today.

Finally, just a few years ago, in the wake of a pandemic that saw the closures of hundreds of child care facilities, President Biden proposed universal child care in his Build Back Better Act. But during congressional negotiations, this initiative got scrapped.

Waiting Isn’t Working. We Need Care Infrastructure Built Now.

The thought of universal child care in this country seems so out of reach right now. The only major federal option for low-income families, Head Start, is under threat of massive budget cuts. And universal pre-K — promised over and over again — remains unavailable in the majority of states.

The effects of the lack of child care are devastating. In Texas, nearly 50% of licensed centers are at risk of closure. In Maryland, the state has lost 15% of its providers since 2020. In Wisconsin, one in four centers say they may have to shut their doors if emergency funding isn’t renewed.

I talk to so many moms and dads who are just hoping and praying that they can make it through the first five years until their child enters kindergarten and can attend public school. Until then, they’re going into debt to pay for child care. It’s the equivalent of a second mortgage for many.

So when you hear elected officials and pundits talk about how families should grow — how moms should do their “duty” and boost the birthrate — ask them this: Where’s the plan? Where’s the policy? Where’s the infrastructure to support the kids you want us to have?

Child care is infrastructure. It’s just as essential as roads, bridges, and broadband. Without it, our economy doesn’t work. Parents can’t work. Children can’t thrive.

The longer our leaders ignore this crisis or try to con us with shiny awards for motherhood, the deeper parents will sink into it. More parents (the majority being moms) will leave the workforce or millions of kids will be unable to get the safe, stable care they deserve. Our economy will take yet another hit.

But here’s the part that gives me hope: we are not standing alone anymore.

There are more of us organizing now, in every corner of the country, calling B.S. on a system that hasn’t evolved in 75 years. We’re building power — from Brooklyn to Madison to the O.C. And we will not be ignored.

  • Share our protest photo (and the one that inspired it) on Instagram and LinkedIn and show how absurd it is that, after 75 years, we’re still protesting this sh*t.
  • The National Head Start Association created a quick way for you to contact your Congress members and urge them to oppose any effort to eliminate or dramatically cut funding for Head Start programs. Take action now. 

Moms everywhere are fired up right now, and you don’t have to take my word for it. Over 25,000 of you took action and demanded that our elected officials make child care more affordable. In case you missed it, we took a trip to DC to hand deliver your signatures to the White House. A huge “thank you” to all who signed our petition to President Trump and sent letters to Congress. 

 
Check out what people are saying about Moms First in the news:

Thanks for reading this week’s edition of The First Word. If this message resonates with you, forward it to a friend or someone stuck on a child care waitlist right now. We’re not just telling stories — we’re building pressure. And with your voice in the mix, it only gets stronger.

 
Let’s keep showing up,
Reshma Saujani