ECE Access Center

Child care access challenges are widespread across the country, but the scale and complexity of the problem can make it difficult for policymakers to know where to begin. Traditional measures of access focus primarily on comparing an estimated demand for care with the number of available “slots.” However, this approach does not adequately capture the preferences, needs, and tradeoffs families must consider every day related to things like affordability, quality, location, and hours, along with whether the care arrangement is able to support their child’s development.

The brief outlines a five-step roadmap for state and community leaders to promote equitable access to early care and education by: adopting a family-centric definition of access; analyzing disaggregated data on services; focusing on specific geographic areas; gathering information about families’ experiences and perceptions; and collaborating with families and community partners to co-design solutions.

The brief describes how Vermont’s expansion of its child-care subsidy program increased family eligibility, waived or reduced copayments, and raised provider reimbursement rates—though many parents remain unaware of the changes.

The brief outlines a method to measure how well early care and education options align with families’ needs and preferences, revealing frequent mismatches—especially for families with subsidies, multiple children, or from minoritized groups.

Parents weigh many factors when searching for and choosing a child care option for their child. While research typically examines factors such as the cost and availability of care within a specific location, families may have additional priorities and preferences for their family’s child care arrangement.

The brief presents a practical guide for states and researchers to design measurement and evaluation strategies that link subsidy policy levers (such as eligibility, copayments, provider payments) with outcomes for children, families, and providers—including equity-focused indicators and qualitative engagement of families and providers.

The report based on the 2019 National Survey of Early Care and Education examines parents' search and decision-making processes to find and access care for their children. finds that around 37% of U.S. households with a child under age 6 searched for child-care/early-education arrangements in the past two years, and among those, the most common reasons cited were to meet parents’ needs (such as work or schedule changes) and to support the child’s development; meanwhile, for those who searched but did not change providers, the primary barriers were affordability and reasonable effort required.

The report provides a detailed examination of how providers and families in Maryland experience the state’s child-care scholarship program, highlighting benefits such as increased participation and affordability and challenges such as administrative burdens and payment delays.

This report gathers parents’ firsthand perspectives to show how families experience access to early care and education—finding that they weigh factors such as effort, cost, developmental support, and alignment with their needs in complex, interrelated ways

The brief outlines a five-step roadmap for state and community leaders to promote equitable access to early care and education by: adopting a family-centric definition of access; analyzing disaggregated data on services; focusing on specific geographic areas; gathering information about families’ experiences and perceptions; and collaborating with families and community partners to co-design solutions.

The brief highlights that while many families of young children need child care during nontraditional hours (early morning, evenings, weekends), existing policies and supply often do not adequately support the kinds of flexible, family-preferred arrangements (especially in-home or relative care) needed to meet that demand.

The brief explains how the 2019 National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE) can be used to measure access to early care and education from a multi-dimensional, family-centric perspective—highlighting its design features, relevant variables, and analytic possibilities.

The report finds that families’ decisions and efforts in searching for child care and early education are influenced by four key dimensions—reasonable effort in the search, affordability, meeting parents’ needs, and supporting children’s development.

The brief by Child Trends defines access to child care and early education from a family-centered perspective, meaning families can, with reasonable effort and affordability, enroll their child in settings that support the child’s development and meet the parents’ needs, and highlights the importance of measuring access through families’ experiences rather than solely through program availability.

The brief illustrates how CCDF state administrators, policymakers, and researchers can apply the outlines a multidimensional “Access Framework” for child-care subsidy policy — emphasizing that true access means care that is affordable, easy for families to find and use, supports children’s development, and aligns with parents’ needs — and shows how states can apply this to equitable policy and measurement during the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) era, including as states respond to and recover from COVID-19 the COVID-19 crisis.

The report examines how state-level consumer education websites provide parents with information about early care and education (ECE) and analyzes how well these sites support access to child care information by being easy to find, addressing affordability, supporting child development, and meeting parents’ needs.