Every few months, we hear the same message: Connecticut has a childcare crisis because there aren’t enough providers.

As someone who has spent more than three decades in early childhood education, I see it differently.

The crisis isn’t simply a shortage of providers. The crisis is that Connecticut is making it nearly impossible for small family childcare homes and independent childcare centers to survive.

The people writing these policies often talk about expanding access to early childhood education. They celebrate Universal Pre-K and the Early Childhood Endowment as investments in children. Those goals are admirable. Every child deserves access to a quality early education.

But what isn’t being discussed is the cost these policies are imposing on the small programs that have been serving Connecticut families for generations.

Family childcare providers and small centers have always operated on a delicate balance.

Infant care is extraordinarily expensive to provide. State regulations require very low child-to-teacher ratios, and babies need constant, individualized care. The true cost of caring for infants is often greater than what families can reasonably afford to pay. For years, providers made that work because toddlers and preschoolers helped balance the books. Tuition from older children offset some of the financial loss of infant care, allowing programs to serve children from infancy until kindergarten.

That balance is disappearing.

As more preschool-aged children leave independent providers for publicly funded preschool classrooms, the revenue that once kept small programs financially healthy disappears. The mortgage doesn’t disappear. Insurance premiums don’t disappear. Food costs don’t disappear. Utility bills don’t disappear.

Licensing requirements certainly don’t disappear.

The infants are still there, but the financial model that made caring for them possible is collapsing. Providers are left with impossible choices: dramatically increase infant tuition, stop accepting infants, reduce services, or close their doors entirely.

That isn’t expanding childcare. It’s reshaping it in a way that threatens the very programs many working families rely on.

At the same time, Connecticut continues to place increasing regulatory burdens on small providers.

No one is arguing against health and safety standards. Children deserve safe, nurturing environments, and providers should absolutely be held accountable for protecting them. But family childcare is not a commercial childcare center. It is someone’s home.

Treating those two settings as though they are identical is like comparing apples to oranges. Large centers have administrative staff, office managers, maintenance personnel, and dedicated budgets for compliance.

Most family childcare providers have one person doing everything. They are the director, the teacher, the cook, the janitor, the bookkeeper, the curriculum coordinator, the maintenance department, the finance office, the marketing department and the parent liaison.

And after working 10- or 12-hour days caring for children, they go home —not to another job, but to their own families.

Yet they are increasingly expected to comply with the same layers of documentation, administrative requirements, and regulatory oversight as organizations with multiple employees and entire administrative teams.

The expectations continue to grow, but the resources do not.

Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than during licensing inspections. In a family childcare program, inspectors may examine virtually every room in the home —even rooms children never enter.

Providers have described receiving violations involving their own children’s bedrooms, private closets, or other personal spaces that are completely inaccessible to enrolled children. Parents naturally ask: if children never enter those rooms, how does inspecting them improve children’s safety?

The same pattern appears in paperwork. A parent forgets to write a ZIP code. A signature is missing a date. A line is left blank.

These are administrative mistakes. They are frustrating, but they do not place children in immediate danger. Yet they can still become licensing violations attached to the provider’s record.

Over time, many providers begin to feel that inspections have shifted away from collaboration and toward finding technical mistakes.

Whether or not that is the state’s intent, many providers experience inspections less as opportunities to improve and more as exercises in searching for deficiencies. That creates a culture of anxiety rather than partnership.

Providers spend days preparing paperwork instead of preparing learning experiences. They worry that a harmless clerical error will outweigh years of exceptional care.

Many describe feeling that they are constantly waiting for the next violation instead of being recognized for the thousands of things they do right every single day.

The result is predictable. Experienced providers are retiring early. Others are choosing not to renew their licenses. Some are deciding the emotional and financial burden simply isn’t worth it anymore.

Every time one of those programs closes, Connecticut loses far more than a few childcare spaces. It loses trusted relationships. It loses flexible care for working families. It loses overnight care, evening care, mixed-age learning, and neighborhood programs that cannot easily be replaced.

Ironically, as policymakers celebrate expanding preschool opportunities, many communities are quietly losing infant and toddler care —the very care that working parents struggle most to find.

If Connecticut truly wants to solve its childcare crisis, it must stop treating family childcare as an afterthought. It must recognize that small providers are not miniature childcare centers. They are small businesses operating inside family homes.

Policies should reflect that reality. Regulations should focus on meaningful health and safety, not technical paperwork errors that have no impact on children’s well-being. Oversight should be rigorous, but it should also be collaborative, practical, and proportional.

Most importantly, Connecticut must recognize that every new mandate has a cost. For a large organization, it may mean another administrative task. For a family childcare provider, it may be the final reason they decide to close.

If we continue down this path, Connecticut won’t lose childcare because providers no longer care. We’ll lose childcare because the people who have dedicated their lives to caring for children have finally decided they can no longer afford —financially or emotionally— to keep doing the job.

Michelle Gagliardi writes on behalf of the Connecticut Family Child Care Coalition.