Much has been written lately about New Mexico’s “universal child care” initiative.
But I think we risk missing the most important lesson if we focus only on the word universal. The real story in New Mexico is not about labels or ideology—it is about process, partnership, and persistence. It is about how a state took a complex problem and did the hard work of building a real-world solution over time.
This did not happen overnight. New Mexico’s progress is the result of more than a decade of work that began under a Republican governor and is now being implemented by a Democratic administration. What we’re seeing today is the product of continuity, bipartisan commitment, and a shared recognition that the child care crisis required sustained action across political cycles. That kind of long arc is rare—and it deserves close attention.
The most important early step was simple, but not easy: they built a bigger tent.
Linda SmithChild care advocates alone cannot change a system this broken. New Mexico understood that from the start.
They brought parents to the table—not just as beneficiaries but as partners and leaders. They engaged the business community, which sees firsthand how child care shortages undermine workforce participation and economic growth. They worked with the education sector to align early learning with K-12 goals. They invested in community-building at the local level so the conversation was not happening in the capital alone, but in neighborhoods, towns, tribal communities, and rural regions across the state.
And critically, both the governor and the state legislature were aligned around solving the problem, not scoring political points. That kind of bipartisan ownership is essential when tackling issues as complicated and resource-intensive as child care.
The takeaway from New Mexico is not “let’s all copy universal child care.”
The takeaway is that process matters. Real solutions take time, coordination, listening, and a willingness to compromise. They require communities to make investments and tradeoffs in service of long-term outcomes. And they demand leadership that understands complex systems do not yield to single, simplistic fixes.
That was true when I worked at the U.S. Department of Defense, and it remains true today: there is no single solution to complex problems. The Department of Defense transformed military child care by moving on all fronts—financing, workforce, quality standards, supply building—at the same time. The New Mexico approach is the same.
What makes this moment particularly important is that New Mexico has put something rare on the table: a real financing solution to a fundamentally broken child care business model.
Providers cannot survive on parent fees alone. Families cannot afford what true quality actually costs. No amount of tinkering around the edges fixes that structural mismatch. New Mexico recognized this and sought to rewrite the financing equation itself.
Just as important, the state made a deliberate choice to center the workforce—because you cannot have high quality without qualified, stable educators. This initiative was never about expanding access to child care “of any quality.” It was about improving what exists while expanding what’s possible.
Investments in professional development, training pathways, compensation improvements, and workforce support were built into the effort from the beginning. Quality isn’t accidental; it is constructed. And the workforce is the foundation.
Are there challenges ahead? Absolutely. Supply shortages remain real. Workforce recruitment and retention are ongoing struggles. Building new capacity takes time.
But New Mexico is not waiting for the market to magically self-correct under conditions that have failed providers for decades. Instead, the state is actively working to stabilize and grow the system with aligned policy, financing, and workforce investments.
That is what solutions look like in the real world—not instant perfection, but sustained progress. So my hat is off to New Mexico—not for claiming to have all the answers, but for being willing to try something bold, responsibly, and collaboratively. They are demonstrating that child care reform is not about chasing philosophical end goals; it is about designing workable systems that address cost, quality, workforce, and access together.
We should all be paying attention—not so that we replicate their model wholesale, but so we learn from their approach.
The most powerful lesson New Mexico offers is not what policy to adopt, but how to build consensus, structure investment, and move forward on multiple fronts simultaneously. Each state will have to design its own path forward. But if we are serious about fixing child care, the New Mexico experience shows us an essential truth: Real solutions are built through process, partnership, and persistence—not slogans.
And this is what progress actually looks like.
Linda Smith is the director of policy at the Buffett Institute, with a specific focus on military, rural, and tribal child care, early childhood financing, and engaging the business community in child care initiatives nationwide.