By Jennifer Fernandez
Annette, a North Carolina woman raising her granddaughter, recounted crying herself to sleep every night before she was able to find child care in her rural Jackson County community.
Finding any kind of child care can be difficult in rural areas. At one point Annette was driving two hours each day to get her granddaughter to child care, said Rachel Shelton, program coordinator for the Western North Carolina Early Childhood Coalition.
Shelton shared Annette’s story at a recent meeting of the North Carolina Child Fatality Task Force. She said it is just one example of how families are struggling with accessing child care in western North Carolina. While 13 child care centers opened in the region in 2025, 26 other centers and family child care homes closed that same year, she said.
Overall, western North Carolina lost 221 child care slots in 2025, she said.
“The truth is that many families across our state are burdened with decisions around work, child care and their well-being,” she said.
Gov. Josh Stein briefly discussed child care during a press conference Monday, March 9, to propose a “critical needs budget.” North Carolina is the only state that failed to pass a comprehensive budget in 2025. Legislators instead passed a more narrowly focused mini-budget in June that did not substantively address child care issues.
Stein said that 262 child care programs have closed since the state last passed a budget in 2024, in part due to inadequate child care subsidies that help low-income families cover the cost of care.
At the State of Child Care in NC roundtable in Durham last month, several current and former child care providers who met with Democratic lawmakers decried the continued lack of funding for child care.
“Parents are stretching paychecks past their breaking points every single day. Providers are holding doors open with sheer will and impossibly thin margins,” said Devonya Govan-Hunt, president and CEO of Black Child Development Institute-Carolinas.
“Far too many children, especially children in rural communities and communities of color, are being left without access to the nurturing early care and education environment that they deserve,” she said.
Economic impact
North Carolina loses $5.65 billion every year in economic activity due to the lack of child care, according to a 2024 report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, the NC Chamber Foundation and NC Child.
The situation is pushing women out of the workforce, argued Sen. Sophia Chitlik (D-Durham) at the Durham roundtable.
“It is especially bad in our state, where we rank 35th in workforce participation among young mothers,” she said. “We cannot expect to continue to be No. 1 in business and among the last places to provide resources for working parents.”
Rep. Vernetta Alston (D-Durham) said child care and foster care are essential infrastructure that are part of the same continuum in many ways because they support vulnerable children and working families. That means they require stable providers and trained professionals, and depend on strong public systems that function well.
Failing to provide that early support through child care leads to families destabilizing, she said.
“Child care is workforce development,” Alston said. “If we are serious about strengthening North Carolina’s future, we must invest across the continuum from early child care to child welfare.”
Kate Irish, executive director of the Durham Partnership for Children, said access to child care is a long-running problem in the state. When she had her first child 15 years ago, Irish said, she went through three child care centers in 18 months. Two closed for financial reasons.
Costs have continued to climb, making it even harder for families to afford child care. Parents in North Carolina pay an average $11,720 annually for one infant in child care, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a national think tank that has examined the issue.
Add in a 4-year-old and that’s another $7,744.
“Any side you come at it, it’s not adding up, and it’s just not affordable,” Irish said. “Families cannot afford child care when child care is more than your mortgage or more than your rent, or it’s … the same cost as college at a public university. I don’t know many people with 2-year-olds that are ready to pay for college.”
Health impact
In a separate report published in 2025, the NC Chamber said that high-quality child care is important for the healthy development of children, especially those who may be exposed to stress or adverse childhood experiences due to poverty or other factors.
The first few years are key to a child’s development, from learning motor skills to acquiring language to setting up good mental health. The brain is growing rapidly, creating nearly a million neural connections per second, absorbing information like a sponge.
Research shows how important early brain development is to health outcomes later in life. A landmark North Carolina study, the Abecedarian Project, followed for decades children from low-income families who received high-quality child care. It found that children who received better care ended up healthier as adults, with lower rates of heart disease and diabetes and better mental health.
“The strength and stability of North Carolina’s future workforce depends on ensuring that children and families who need it are able to access high-quality child care that fosters healthy development,” the authors wrote.
The N.C. Child Fatality Task Force has been recommending since 2024 that North Carolina support efforts to improve the child care system, including increasing subsidies, especially in the wake of additional federal child care stabilization grants that sunset as the COVID pandemic wound down.
“We continue to face a child care crisis in this state, and it is not going away,” said task force member Whitney Belich. “In fact, it is getting worse.”
“There are not easy solutions to these problems,” Belich said. “It’s not just something that we can simply throw money at and call it a day. We have to have structure, options and solutions that are targeted at what the problem is. We need to see significant public investment in child care access alongside public and private innovation. So it’s not just a one-phase attack, it’s multiple phases.”
The task force is a legislative study group of volunteer experts, state agency leaders, community leaders and state legislators who research child health issues and make policy and spending recommendations to the General Assembly.
The task force voted to support growth and expansion of investments in the early child care system, including increases for child care subsidies, as part of its 2026 recommendations to legislators. The group made the same request in the last two annual reports to the governor and General Assembly.
Finding solutions
In recent years, the General Assembly has spent money to increase the capacity of family child care homes and has increased child care subsidies, although the increase was based on older market data.
In the 2023 state budget, the General Assembly set aside money to pilot a Tri-Share Child Care project, which creates a public/private partnership to share the cost of child care equally among employers, eligible employees and the state. The pilot — modeled after a successful program in Michigan — launched in 2024 and expanded in 2025 to employers statewide.
Child care providers have struggled to stay afloat even more after losing the federal stabilization grants, which expired in 2025. The money, which was approved by Congress during the pandemic, helped child care centers pay teachers more through raises or bonuses; some were even able to provide benefits — often for the first time.
Advocates repeatedly asked state legislators to cover that cost, warning that the loss would lead to more facilities closing as workers fled to other jobs that could pay better.
The pace of child care closures has sped up since that funding disappeared, according to an analysis by EdNC. In all, the state has lost 367 programs since the start of the pandemic. About 12 percent of those programs closed from October to December 2025, the news outlet reported.
At the Durham roundtable, Democratic state lawmakers blamed their Republican colleagues, saying they have not done enough to address funding to protect child care access.
“The term child care crisis is thrown around a lot, but there is nothing natural about this disaster,” Chitlik said. “It was not inevitable in any way. It was, and continues to be a policy choice and a policy choice largely made by Republican septuagenarians who refuse to listen to the overwhelming consensus of parents and providers, including many in this room, for decades.”
Democratic lawmakers proposed a series of reforms and supports in a bill introduced in March 2025 in the Senate. The bill failed to advance and none of the measures made it into the mini-budget passed in June.
Govan-Hunt said there are some key areas to address: stabilizing the workforce by improving compensation and benefits, expanding and modernizing subsidies to tackle the waitlist, and investing intentionally, especially where the gaps are the greatest such as rural areas.
“The question before us is not whether we know what to do,” she said. “The question is whether we will act on the urgency that this moment demands.”
Kate Goodwin, who hosted the roundtable at her center, Kate’s Korner Learning Center, said one of the big issues of running a child care center is the cost of infrastructure. She encouraged looking at creative partnerships, such as using churches when they are empty.
“As we start working through this, I would just ask people to think about what are the long-term solutions, versus the quick and easy and notable, but the ones that are going to make the most impact,” she said.
Dee Dee Fields, a former child care provider now working with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, has more than 32 years of experience working in child care.
“I am now 57 years old, and we are still functioning on a broken system,” she said. “Something has to change.”
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