A father headed down the day care’s brick hallway, passing the bulletin board with parent notices and photos of children tacked up around it. A staffer said he could find his daughter in a classroom with all girls; all the boys had gone.
“What happened to Alex?” he asked.
“He left.”
“Ah.”
The attrition at Kids of Faith Place in Oklahoma City was tracked on a whiteboard in the office. “Kids Last day!” the left side read, over a list of children saying goodbye: “Hayleigh & Hunter — Feb 6th.” “Jayson — Feb 6th.” The right side listed teachers’ last days: “Haylee — Feb 6th. Lizeth — Feb 13th.” In the bottom-left corner, someone had written “Last day is Feb 27th,” alongside a frowny face.
Kids of Faith announced in mid-January that it would close at the end of the next month. By early February, with a few weeks to go, there were 60 children left and few alternate day care options for families to turn to. More than 400 day cares in Oklahoma had gone out of business since November — pulled under, like Kids of Faith, by disappearing federal and state funding.
Top Trump administration officials have urged Americans to have more children, a hard message for many people to reconcile with the financial reality of child care.
Seven in 10 Americans who responded to a national survey last year — a higher proportion than ever — said that cost was the main reason they weren’t having more children, or any children. The near universality of the problem has made child care affordability a top talking point for politicians like Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York and candidates campaigning for this fall’s midterms.
But some administration officials and their conservative allies believe children shouldn’t necessarily be in day care at all. Instead of subsidizing commercial child care, they said, the government could strengthen American families by giving parents tax credits or other forms of support to stay home with their children. Married, heterosexual parents, specifically.
“I think deep down, most moms sob inside when they drive to day care, wishing they could actually raise their kids all day long,” Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist and Trump ally who was assassinated in September, once said.
Some cultural winds are blowing the conservatives’ way. Many women lament on social media that careerism has left them feeling exhausted rather than fulfilled. So-called trad-wife influencers have risen to fame promoting old-fashioned gender norms, staying at home with their many children while their husbands win the bread.
But most parents still have bills to pay.
“I would if I could stay at home,” said Chelsea Moore, 35, one of the teachers at Kids of Faith, whose 4-year-old daughter was supposed to go to the day care during summer break. “I feel like that’s not a luxury we have these days in America.” The closure left her needing to find a new job and new child care, too.
Run by a church off Interstate 40, Kids of Faith was affordable by local standards, but hardly cheap. One family, the Pancoasts, paid $18,000 for their two boys last year. On average, the cost of child care in Oklahoma was higher than in-state tuition at public colleges. Child care prices in most states shot up more than twice as fast as prices overall from 2023 to 2024, according to an analysis by the left-leaning Century Foundation.
Yet profit margins remain scrawny for most day cares, largely because of labor costs for staff. After the coronavirus pandemic rocked the already rickety industry, emergency federal funding in 2020 helped more than 200,000 child care providers stay open. But the federal relief expired in 2024, and most states didn’t make up the shortfall.
The Trump administration has no apparent plans to step in. It tried to block other child care funds earlier this year over what it said were fraud concerns, and President Trump said at the White House earlier this month that “the United States can’t take care of day care.” Amid a war with Iran, he went on, “We have to take care of one thing: military protection.”
Instead, he said, states should raise taxes to pay for day care.
Oklahoma has gone the opposite route. When the state announced it was cutting funding for school-aged children last November, erasing one of the main sources of revenue for day cares, centers started closing. Kids of Faith was one. More closures are expected to follow this month, after Oklahoma cuts subsidy rates, and in July, when the state plans to make it harder for parents to qualify for subsidies.
The day the announcement went out at Kids of Faith, pickup time found many parents and staff members in tears. Then the families started scrambling. The father of one child posted on Facebook asking for recommendations. “Sad day today,” he wrote, blaming President Trump for failing to fund child care.
Another parent, Logan Lay, was in and out of the hospital with her son the first few weeks after the announcement — he had come down with a respiratory virus. By the time he was better, she and her fiancé had no paid leave left to search. Few centers were open late enough for them to pick up their baby on time. Vice President JD Vance had suggested in 2024 that parents should have family members help with child care, but Ms. Lay’s relatives didn’t live nearby.
For Ms. Lay’s co-worker and fellow Kids of Faith parent Makenzie Pancoast, 29, paying nearly double at a more expensive day care would have wiped out much of her paycheck from Mathis Home, the furniture company where she was a recruiter. She and her husband, a construction superintendent, had already been discussing the idea of her staying home with their 6-month-old and 2-year-old, maybe starting next year. When the Kids of Faith email went out, he told her, “Well, that’s your date.”
She loved her job. Staying home wasn’t the dream. But she was also excited to take her sons to the park and the library, to escape the hourlong commute back to the suburbs for dinnertime and bath time and bedtime only to be up again before 6 the next morning. “I can always come back to work and make the money, but I can’t gain back the time with them,” she said.
She was also intrigued by the homesteading trend, which had young people moving to the country to find self-sufficiency and live off the land. She’d finally have time to garden. She and her husband tried their first homemade bread, which had turned out well, plus it “didn’t have all the gunk in it that you find with the processed stuff,” she said. They ran the numbers, and with some cutbacks — less eating out, fewer purchases at Target — they were confident they could live on one income, especially without day care and gas for her commute.
“Just the idea of breaking free from that 9-to-5 and getting to do things that have more meaning and purpose behind it, getting back to what feels good and serving my boys and serving my husband,” Ms. Pancoast said. “I feel excited for the freedom of that, honestly.” She planned to work until the day Kids of Faith closed.
Ms. Lay, 25, who worked with Ms. Pancoast, had spent six years climbing the ranks at Mathis Home, rising from part-time cashier to customer care manager — not the type of job she’d find elsewhere easily without a college degree. Nor would another job have given her the flexibility to take night classes toward becoming an ultrasound technician, the higher-paying career she was aiming for.
“I worked really hard to get where I am,” she said, “and now it’s almost like my option is quit to take care of him.” Her mouth twisted. “It seems like that’s what they want mothers to be forced into, essentially.”
Besides: “What’s so wrong with a woman wanting to work?” she said. Her family couldn’t afford for her to quit, anyway.
Half the parents at Kids of Faith received state subsidies. The other half, including the Pancoasts and Ms. Lay and her fiancé, made too much to qualify but not enough to wave off the cost of paying themselves.
“The people that are in the middle are stuck either going broke paying for child care, or we’re not broke enough to get a subsidy,” Ms. Lay said. “Makenzie’s doing the smartest financial option that there is.”
Now it was Kids of Faith’s last day, a Friday, and the teachers were saying goodbye to 21 children. Ms. Lay’s son was the only infant left, crawling while the 1-year-olds toddled around him. The 2-year-olds dug into farewell cupcakes, though Ms. Pancoast’s son wanted just the frosting. The 4-year-olds had pizza, and Miss Javonna, their teacher, brought in a pair of white sneakers for them to scribble on as a memento.
As parents began streaming in for pickup at around 3 that afternoon, they snapped photos of their children with their first teachers and folded them into long hugs. A few teachers still didn’t have new jobs lined up. Not all the children had new places to go, either.
Ms. Lay arrived from the furniture company around 5 and lifted her son into his stroller. The new day care she had been considering turned out to cost $100 more per week than advertised. She and her fiancé decided to ask his sister to watch their child for $25 a week instead.
On her way out of Kids of Faith for the last time, Ms. Lay paused in the hallway and reached up for the photo of her baby with a few of his former classmates, lying on their backs in onesies. “I’m robbing this,” she told a staff member. “It’s so sad!”
Vivian Yee is a Times reporter who writes about women in America, focusing on cultural and political shifts during the Trump years.
The post The Last Day at Kids of Faith: Parents Navigating a Child Care Crisis appeared first on New York Times.
