While policy leaders in the U.S. debate ways to address the problem of an aging population and the shortage of babies being born each year, nature offers foundational lessons. Every animal has more offspring when there are systems to support having more babies. This includes food and habitat, and for some, pressure from predators to ensure the survival of the species. In contrast, when habitat is limited and food is scarce, there are fewer babies. Survival is the number one goal—self, then babies, and the ongoing generations.
For humans, especially those living in the United States, the solution is simple: create an environment that supports families. If we want more children, we need to make it financially possible for moms and dads to feed, clothe, house, and educate their children, instead of worrying about how they can afford both rent and childcare, food and healthcare, and what kind of future their children may face amidst rising homelessness and joblessness, both now, and decades in the future.
The future for most parents in the U.S. is bleak. Many are struggling, and no amount of promoting #tradwives will feed the kids when even two-income parents struggle to make ends meet. The reason it’s most parents who are struggling, and not all, is that some states are moving to fix the problem.
New Mexico became the first state to offer universal childcare. This didn’t happen overnight. Efforts began in 2019 with partial childcare for parents at or below 400% of the federal poverty level. It expanded on November 1, 2025, to include everyone.
“Childcare is essential to family stability, workforce participation, and New Mexico’s future prosperity,” said Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham. “By investing in universal childcare, we are giving families financial relief, supporting our economy, and ensuring that every child has the opportunity to grow and thrive.” Other goals include supporting the wages of those working in the childcare industry, building more facilities for childcare, providing economic stability for businesses employing mothers who typically lose days and even jobs struggling to care for children on their own. Most of all, New Mexico is showing the country that it can be done.
“500,000 women left the workforce because they couldn’t afford childcare,” Reshma Saujani, founder of Moms First, told Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. “Mothers have been being conned since the ink dried on the Constitution. What do I mean by that? Why does work end at 6, and I have to pick up my kids at 3:30? Why do I have to pay more for childcare than I pay for my mortgage? Why do one out of four women go back to work two weeks after having a baby?” Saujani says that we need a mothers’ movement – and with Moms First and the new documentary No Country for Mothers, which premieres on June 15 – she is working to build one.
Accompanying Saujani’s documentary is a report co-sponsored by McKinsey & Company. The analysis calls childcare “The Most Overlooked Lever for Workforce Stability.” And points out the bottom line, “Childcare disruptions cost U.S. businesses up to $70 billion every year in lost productivity, turnover, and absenteeism.” It also notes that with loss is a “clear actionable opportunity.” Some businesses get it and offer some level of childcare tailored to their employees’ specific needs, such as on-site daycare for nurses in healthcare facilities. But the issue is too widespread for individual businesses to tackle. And most solutions require public-private partnerships, such as New Mexico’s. No one can solve it alone, given how many resources are required to deliver quality care for our next generation.
And more leaders are moving to meet the need, like New York City’s recent support for 2-K childcare in certain districts and its little-known caregiving program for city workers. Chabeli Carrazana reported for The 19th, “In September, the city will open what appears to be the first free daycare for municipal workers in the country. The center, called The Little Apple, is a pilot program that could prove to be a model for cities across the country that are childcare curious, but not ready to take the big universal swing.”
In 2023, Vermont passed Act 76, a universal childcare bill that increased the salaries of early education employees, which were so low as not to be a living wage, and the main reason three of five young children had no access to childcare. “Long-term, sustainable public investment into Vermont’s childcare system will support this essential industry, put hundreds of parents back into the workforce, and create millions of dollars in economic impact,” reported Let’s Grow Kids, the nonprofit responsible for the decade-long effort to get the bill passed.
It hasn’t always been this way. At one point, the United States had universal childcare. “Through the Lanham Act, the federal government built a nationwide network of childcare centers from the ground up, with well-trained caregivers, availability six days a week, twelve hours a day, open to any working mother regardless of income. By late 1944, you could send your two-to-five-year-old to a quality childcare center, meals and snacks included, for fifty cents a day, roughly ten dollars today,” Saujani reported in her June 3 Substack letter. When the men went to fight in WWII in 1943, the country needed women to work, and women needed childcare. Then the men came home, and the Lanham Act was repealed; women returned home, and the propaganda machine convinced them to stay there—for a while.
Today, that propaganda machine is turning women against women. Again. It worked in the 1970s when Phyllis Schlafly motivated women to reject the ERA. And it’s in full swing today with the #tradwife pitted against the #girlboss. Many women don’t have an option. They are single parents whose poverty level ranks twice as high as their male counterparts. And many others want a choice to be a parent and pursue a career. Those who do often raise healthier families, more capable sons and daughters who have successful role models at home and in their profession.
Sheryl Sandberg, founder of LeanIn, worried about pitting women against women and men against women in the culture wars in her March 18 “The Lead.” She wrote, “The problem with the romanticized vision of the tradwife is that it signals to women that to be a good wife, partner, or mother, you have to do it full-time. This gives working women one more burden to carry on top of everything they already manage: guilt.” Sandberg says this isn’t new; it’s decades old and unbelievable that women will say to a woman in medical school, “Don’t you want to have kids someday?” She notes that men are rarely asked that question.
So that’s the conversation. Pitting women against women, and men against women is a system to keep us distracted from the issue that requires a simple solution—universal childcare. To be a healthy society, we need to support people with policies that promote successful families, drive the economic engine of business with reliable, satisfied employees who are paid enough to own a home, and enable profitability of other businesses by supporting their ability to buy goods and services. It seems so simple, and the U.S. has done it before. States are starting to do it. We need to ignore those voices that would divide us. Join the mothers’ movement (whether or not you’re a mother), lift up this generation and the next with policies and partnerships that work—together.