Many governors across the country, Democrats and Republicans alike, are making a point of mentioning childcare these days. In fact, nearly half of them mentioned it in their 2026 State of the State addresses, according to a tally released this week by the Center for American Progress. And it stands to reason. Childcare is less affordable than ever, even for middle-0class families, and voters want the government to do something about it.
To that end, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger on Wednesday signed a bill creating an Employee Child Care Assistance program that would, through matching government funds, incentivize companies to contribute to their employees’ childcare costs. “Because when a family cannot afford child care, oftentimes a parent—and the numbers bear it out, oftentimes a mom—drops out of the workforce altogether. That doesn’t just create a family budget issue, that creates a challenge for our economy,” Spanberger said.
It is true that women are disproportionately likely to drop out of the workforce because they can’t afford to pay for care for young children. But a survey released Wednesday from New America, a nonpartisan, liberal think tank, paints a more complicated picture. Parents of young children want to work, but they also want to be able to spend more time with their children. Making childcare more affordable only addresses half of that equation. What can policymakers do to give parents more time with their children?
The research, from New America’s New Practice Lab, surveyed 5,472 parents with children under 6 years old and found that across income groups and around the country, 72 percent wanted more quality time with their kids—even more than they wanted personal time (63 percent) or sleep (56 percent). The most common ways they wanted to spend this time were “playing, enjoying outdoor activities, and traveling.” Alas, more than half of them said they didn’t have enough money for the kind of childcare arrangement that would allow for more time with their kids.
This was true for men as well as women, and the problem started from the moment their child was born: Nearly everyone said that they didn’t get to take the amount of parental leave they would have preferred, with 59 percent taking six weeks or less and 15 percent taking no leave at all.
“At its simplest, parents need money, but they also need time,” said Tara Dawson McGuinness, executive director of the New Practice Lab. “It’s one thing to be able to afford putting food on the table, but we heard in some of the open-ended questions, a real hunger…to be there with your children at the dinner table, and that wages and work were competing with the ability for people to see their kids.”
This is why Democrats around the country are pushing for more paid family leave; Spanberger recently signed such a bill in Virginia. While there’s no federal guarantee of paid family leave, a recent analysis by the National Partnership for Women & Families found that the District of Columbia and 13 states have passed paid-leave laws, providing coverage for nearly a third of private-sector workers across the country; that number would rise to 44 percent if six more states follow through with efforts to pass such a law. Having the right to leave doesn’t mean workers will take it, though; states also need to ensure that workers can afford to take the time and are not punished for doing so.
But paid family leave typically covers only the time right after birth, or when an adopted child joins a family. The New America survey showed that parents wanted more time with their kids throughout their toddler years as well. But when workers, especially women, take extended time out of the workforce to be with young children, they face barriers returning to work and take a hit in their lifetime earnings. As long as women are discriminated against after having children, the prospect of taking more time off to be with children is unlikely to appeal to men, out of fear that they would be punished in the workplace, too.
Unsurprisingly, low-income parents faced the biggest hurdles finding family time and affording activities, according to the New America study. But parents with higher incomes also wanted more time with their children and named financial concerns as a big reason they couldn’t have it. “What struck us… was how many commonalities there were across income levels,” said Kelly Bidwell, who also worked on the report.
While most of the parents they surveyed wanted to work, there weren’t clear majorities when it came to how their work schedules should look. Parents wanted flexibility, and the biggest barrier to that was money. Two-thirds of parents, across all income groups, said they wanted higher wages, both to be able to afford the activities they wanted to do with their kids and to be able to work less.
The U.S. does need more affordable childcare. But providing that doesn’t solve this fundamental problem: Parents want the resources to be able to spend more time with their children while they’re young. No policymaker can find more hours in a day, but one of the big reasons parents don’t take off more time for their families is that they don’t earn enough to be able to do so. “We are not having a national conversation about time and wages, which are what parents are really asking for,” McGuinness said. “Our policies for families aren’t wrong, but they are not exactly right either.”
