One week after giving birth, one of my closest friends went back to work. She can’t work without child care, but care is so expensive it barely makes sense to work. Still, she needs a paycheck to keep her family afloat. Her only option was a lower-wage remote job that lets her care for her newborn while working. This is a reality for thousands of our friends, families and neighbors. It shouldn’t be this way, and it doesn’t have to be.
Child care is what makes our economy work. Governor Kelly Ayotte’s office has been sharing headlines about affordable child care options. She recently said access to child care is as critical as housing for quality of life in New Hampshire.
That sounds promising. When business leaders, lawmakers, advocates and providers met last week to tackle this challenge head-on, I was hopeful. But the solutions I heard from our governor and the realities families face suggest they aren’t living the same reality.
Governor Ayotte shared her own story. She had family help, and said she rolled from paying off student loans into paying for child care. For many families, that’s not possible. Many grandparents are still working or not available. Parents are still paying off student loans decades after graduation. That might have worked a generation ago, but it doesn’t reflect life today. Most of us are piecing together care in a system not built for what families face now.
In New Hampshire, even families making $100,000 a year can’t cover the basics. The average household still comes up about $2,000 short. Compared to 2015, that same family now has $17,000 less left after paying for housing, food, gas, health care and child care. For single moms, it’s even worse: caring for one baby costs nearly $22,000 a year, nearly half of what they are paid.
Modern New Hampshire families are being asked to do more with less.
Wages are flat, costs keep climbing, and families are running on fumes. So when the proposed solutions to our child care crisis focus on business toolkits and tax incentives, financing models and regulatory or zoning tweaks, it’s hard to take seriously. Those ideas don’t meet the crisis families and small businesses are facing.
Look at the basics. New Hampshire is missing about 9,107 licensed child care slots. The median child care worker wage in 2023 was $15.62 an hour, less than many retail jobs. Full-time center-based care for one infant and one preschooler costs nearly $32,000 a year, more than four times what the federal government considers affordable.
The governor’s office has celebrated her as a champion of child care scholarships. But in a year when infant care averaged about $22,000, there was not a single new dollar to help families afford it. Flat funding in this economy is a cut. Many families who qualify for scholarships still face high copayments and cost shares, and those just over the limit get no help at all.
Child care keeps getting harder to find and afford, making it impossible for small businesses to find workers, because Governor Ayotte and conservatives have drained the budget with repeated tax cuts for the wealthiest and big corporations. They eliminated the interest and dividends tax and repeatedly cut the business profits and business enterprise taxes. That leaves New Hampshire with less money for solutions that help families.
Now there is a push for a new $26 million tax break for wealthy multinational corporations, which would shift more costs onto the rest of us through higher property taxes. HB 155 would drain even more from schools, housing, child care and health care.
Families need real solutions: better pay and benefits for child care workers, scholarships that don’t punish families for earning a little more, new investments to expand care where it is needed most and a strong state budget to make it possible. Child care is not a perk. It is infrastructure that keeps our economy running for everyone.
Families don’t need fake solutions or empty promises. We need real investments, real accountability, and real change. A truly collaborative approach starts with facing the hard truth that our state’s revenue base is crumbling. If we value child care like we say we do, it’s time to put our money where our mouth is.
We can build a New Hampshire where families get a fair break and costs come down, if corporations and the very wealthy pay what they owe, just like everyone else. That is how we lower property taxes and make life affordable again.
MacKenzie Nicholson is the senior director of MomsRising in New Hampshire. She lives in Nottingham.