Getting ‘Up To Speed’ On NH’s Child Care Challenges

A new poll of New Hampshire voters shows they believe finding childcare is a major concern, and they support using scholarships to help working families fund their childcare needs.

The poll, conducted by pollster Alex Lundry of Redbud Consulting, found that 58 percent of Granite State voters believe families with young children are struggling, while just 2 percent think they are thriving — a more pessimistic view than the national average. Only 13 percent of respondents said they were “very confident” that families in their community have the resources and support they need.

What’s the real state of childcare in New Hampshire? What impact is it having on the state’s workforce, or its ability to keep younger residents in the state?

New Hampshire asks Lundry, as well as Rebecca Woitkowski of New Futures, in this episode of Up To Speed.

How do families with young children in New Hampshire, or young families hoping to have children, view the child care issue?

WOITKOWSKI: “The reality is that New Hampshire families don’t have a lot of choice when it comes to what is available for the care of their children. Therefore, many families are choosing not to have children or to have fewer children. And that really is based on the economic costs and availability of childcare that meets a family’s values and needs with regard to their own family dynamic.”

When you ask people how they feel about childcare and its availability in New Hampshire, what do they tell you?

LUNDRY: Only 10 percent said it was affordable. And what’s really stunning is, when we asked if they thought it was expensive, you actually had almost half of the states classifying it as ‘very expensive.’ So the cost is really meaningful and is really putting a real dent in the budgets of our friends and neighbors here in New Hampshire. On availability, too, you’ve got about a third of the state that says it’s really hard to find.

Your poll shows strong support for ‘scholarships’ for preschool and early childhood education. Is that like Education Freedom Accounts for daycare? How would it work?

WOITKOWSKI: So the child care scholarship program is a little bit different (than EFAs). It is available to working parents in New Hampshire. It doesn’t provide a full dollar-for-dollar supplement for your childcare costs, but provides a discount on those costs. It can be used in a number of different settings, including those at home or neighborhood settings, to church childcare centers, and it supports childcare access from birth through age 13.

And it’s really rooted in parent choice. It’s connected to the fact that this is to support working families who do not earn the wages to afford childcare on their own. And there are great studies around the economic driver that the child care scholarship program is in New Hampshire.

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.