For generations, miners carried canaries into coal mines because the birds could detect danger before humans could. If the canary stopped singing, everyone knew something deadly was happening underground.

Those of us working in childcare are the canaries now.

We are sounding the alarm because we see, firsthand, that the childcare industry is crumbling beneath us. Teachers burning out from impossible demands and poverty-level wages. Program directors skipping their own paychecks just to keep staff employed and doors open. Families paying prices they cannot afford while providers still struggle to survive.

The cost of providing care has exploded. Rent, food, insurance, utilities, supplies and wages have all increased dramatically during this period of historic inflation. Childcare programs are caught in an impossible bind, which is that families cannot afford to pay more, but providers cannot afford to charge less.

Now the people who built this field are leaving. Many of the caregivers and directors who poured their hearts, lives and personal finances into childcare for the last 20 to 40 years are retiring. The generation behind them is not stepping in to replace them. Young educators are looking at the stress, the liability, the emotional exhaustion and the wages that cannot cover rent or groceries, and they are walking away.

Can we blame them? Even the most passionate caregiver cannot survive on devotion alone.

And, as licensed child care programs continue closing under financial pressure, families will increasingly be pushed toward unlicensed care simply because they have no other options.

I have talked to parents in Utah who are not choosing unlicensed settings because they want less oversight. They are choosing them because licensed care is not available or too expensive. But unlicensed care often lacks critical safeguards such as background checks, safety standards, training requirements and regular inspections.

History has shown us the risks of leaving children in environments without accountability or oversight. Our children are not worth gambling with. We must stop treating safe early childhood care as optional and start treating it as what it truly is: a public good and a public responsibility.

Without immediate and significant public investment, quality childcare as we know it will largely disappear within five years. You can hold me to that prediction. And it will not only hurt families with young children. It will destabilize the entire economy.

Childcare is the workforce behind the workforce. When it disappears, parents leave jobs, businesses lose employees and communities lose economic stability.

This conversation is about more than preventing collapse. It is about recognizing that investing in early childhood is one of the smartest investments a society can make. We already know this because we have done it before. Before the United States invested in public education, universal schooling was not without controversy. People questioned whether education should be publicly funded. Over time, we recognized something fundamental: Investing in children strengthens entire communities.

But we have drawn an arbitrary line at age five.

The years from birth to five are the most rapid period of brain development in human life. Language acquisition, emotional regulation, social skills and early literacy foundations are all built during these years. By the time a child enters kindergarten, many developmental trajectories are already deeply established.

Utah is already seeing warning signs of what happens when we fail to invest early enough. Third-grade literacy rates remain a major concern across the state, despite years of intervention efforts. We continue spending enormous amounts of money trying to remediate problems later, while underinvesting in the very years when those foundations are first formed. High quality early education is far less expensive and far more effective to build strong foundations early than to repair gaps later.

At the same time, Utah’s birth rate continues to decline. Young families are delaying or deciding against having children for many reasons, but the cost and instability of childcare is undeniably part of that equation.

If Utah truly wants to remain a family-friendly state, then we must create conditions where families can realistically raise children. Public investment in early childhood would not simply “help parents.” It would strengthen workforce participation, improve child outcomes, support literacy and school readiness, stabilize businesses and make family life more economically possible.

This is infrastructure.

We already accept that roads, schools and public safety require public investment because society functions better when those systems are stable. Early childhood care and education deserves to be viewed the same way.

Instead, we continue asking an underpaid, overwhelmingly female workforce to hold together one of the most essential systems in our economy through sheer sacrifice and goodwill. That is not sustainable policy.

The shift that happened for K–12 education must now happen for children ages 0 to 5. Because the canaries are still singing. But not for much longer.

Sarah Stone, Ph.D., is the UAEYC Care For Kids director. She is also the founder and board chair of Wonderbloom Nature Playschool.

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