How Much Child Care and Early Education Do Massachusetts Parents Want?

It is challenging to know what target to aim for in early education policy. As of January 2026, 53 percent of Massachusetts children who were too young to be in kindergarten were enrolled in formal early education and care, receiving services from child care centers, licensed family-based providers, or schools.1 Should we be aiming to build a system with 60 percent of young children in formal care? 70 percent? 80 percent? And what mix of care types should that system offer? Knowing what target to aim for is harder in early education than in many other policy domains because care is provided in a variety of settings, families can have quite different needs and preferences, and those needs and preferences often change depending on the child’s age and parents’ employment situation. In a recent paper (Liebman 2024), I discuss why, in the absence of government subsidies, the market will provide too little child care and why the care that is provided will, on average, be lower than optimal in quality. The paper goes on to describe the benefits to children and to the Massachusetts economy of correcting this market failure and provides a three-step roadmap to a system of high-quality accessible care. The earlier paper did not present cost estimates for pursuing this three-step path because I lacked information on how much care and what types of care parents would choose if affordability were not an issue. To fill in this gap, I recently fielded a survey of 1001 Massachusetts mothers with children ages 0-4. The current paper presents the results of this survey. A companion policy brief (Liebman 2026) uses the survey results to construct estimates of the quality, availability, and affordability gaps facing the Massachusetts system of early education and care and provides estimates of the budgetary cost of the proposed roadmap to an improved system. The survey finds that Massachusetts mothers would like to be using a lot more formal child care than they currently are. Among families not currently using formal child care for their young child, 78 percent say they would use formal child care if it were free, and the median family would use 25 hours per week of care. Among families currently using formal child care, 68 percent would use more hours if care were free. If cost were not an issue, 53 percent of families say they would use center-based care, 17 percent would use licensed family care, and 18 percent would use school-based care. These results suggest that, overall, 89 percent of families would use at least some formal childcare for their child if child care were free, compared to the 53 percent who use formal child care today. Parent desire for formal childcare varies only modestly with the age of the child. Even among parents of infants, 85 percent of parents would use some formal care. The survey also collected extensive information on current child care arrangements and how families pay for them, satisfaction with these current arrangements, return to work after childbirth, preferences between cash assistance and subsidized child care, and parents’ general views on child care.