Imagine your life without child care worries.

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Let’s get the child care we deserve.

If you have young children, you know that quality child care is too hard to find and too expensive. For a lot of families here, it’s the biggest expense after housing. It puts so many families in an impossible position.

Every family deserves an equal opportunity to have their kids in quality early learning programs. The good news is that the Legislature has the tools it needs to make this happen.

If you’re a parent or caregiver, you do everything you can to give your child the best possible start in life. Early learning prepares children to learn, grow, and succeed. Those early years are so important for brain development—it’s the best time to build a strong foundation for success in school and life.

Imagine what your life would be like without child care worries. Then ask your legislators: Are you doing everything you can to support families and children like mine? Take action by signing up above.

Supporting young keiki means supporting the workers who care for and educate them.

Early childhood educators help young children learn and grow during critical years when their brains are rapidly developing. But we don’t have enough early childhood educators in the state to meet our families’ needs. To ensure that all keiki have access to child care, we need a strong child care workforce.

We want child care providers to have high standards, but that means they have high costs. Child care is already so expensive for families that providers’ only choice is to lower their wages. Most child care workers aren’t paid a living wage, so they struggle to make ends meet. One in six child care workers in Hawaiʻi lives in poverty. This makes it hard to get people to work in child care, even though it’s so important for children and families.

Families can’t afford to pay any higher prices, and child care providers can’t cut costs any further. So to give all children equal access to child care, the Legislature needs to fill in the gap and help build up the child care workforce.

A great child care system would benefit our entire state.

When all families have equal access to child care, then they have choices that benefit our entire community and economy. Working parents should be able to choose to return to their jobs, which also helps employers, or get the education they need to further their careers. This drives our state’s economic growth. Also, child care providers are small, local businesses. They’ll be able to create more jobs that strengthen our local economy.

Fixing child care means treating it like the public good it is.

Right now, we treat child care like a privilege or luxury good—it’s only available if you can afford it. But this is clearly not working for children and families. In reality, child care is a public good, just like roads, bridges, libraries, and schools. As with those other types of infrastructure, our entire community would benefit if we used public resources to ensure that quality child care is widely available. This means getting the Legislature to use public funds to support the workers who make child care possible.