Military families need more child care. Can Pentagon deliver?

At a time when recruiting and retaining troops is becoming an urgent challenge for the Pentagon, better access to childcare is increasingly seen as a must for military families. Defense officials, in turn, have pledged that this is a priority.

The Department of Defense is building more child care centers and increasing incentives for child care workers to fill chronic staff shortages and help parents get rid of long waiting lists.

There are other initiatives. The National Guard launched a pilot program this year to make child care free during weekend exercises, and the Pentagon has announced a pilot plan to fly in trusted people like grandparents to care for children when the wait list at a base facility is longer than a month.

Defense officials realize they have over-promised and under-delivered in the past, advocates for military families say. The challenge for the future, they add, is to ensure that the Pentagon delivers the services it advertises.

About 40% of active duty service members have children. The largest percentage of those children are 5 years or younger.

“So you can imagine how important it is to have access to affordable, quality care,” said Patty Barron, the Pentagon liaison who oversees military child care policy.

At a time when recruiting and retaining troops is becoming an urgent challenge for the Pentagon, better access to childcare is increasingly seen as a must for military families. Defense officials, in turn, have pledged that this is a priority.

The question is whether they can make that happen. Kayla Corbitt hopes so, but her experience with the system has not been without frustration. This came as a surprise. When she married her military husband after meeting him in graduate school, her overall impression was that they were “great,” although she was a bit vague about the range of services available to military families.

The couple’s initial messages belied that belief. When she became pregnant, Ms. Corbitt quit her job at the base in Italy because of “such limited access” to child care. However, she worked hard to learn the ins and outs of applying for childcare spots within the military system, and thought she would navigate it like a champ when her family was deployed to the Washington, DC area in 2019.

She didn’t. Childcare resources for military families in the region were not enough “to meet even half of the demand,” Ms. Corbitt said. She spent $7,000 in out-of-pocket expenses for waitlist fees and deposits that were never refunded. Due to lack of care, Mrs. Corbitt quit her new job. It took her a year to get another one lined up with a spot for her child.

The Pentagon has been busy building more child care centers and increasing incentives for child care workers to fill chronic staff shortages and help parents get rid of long waiting lists. There are also other initiatives. The National Guard launched a pilot program this year to make child care free during weekend exercises, and the Pentagon has announced a pilot plan to fly in grandparents to care for children if the wait list at a base facility is longer than a month.

Defense officials realize they have over-promised and under-delivered in the past, advocates for military families say. The challenge for the future, they add, is to ensure that the Pentagon delivers the services it advertises.

Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth has noted that as a mother herself, she understands “how difficult” child care can be to find, “and how expensive it can be when you do find it.”

Shortening long waiting lists

In the absence of immediate care options, many military families have little choice but to wait. According to the Census Bureau, the cost of child care in the United States alone nearly doubled between 1985 and 2011. According to the Congressional Research Service, this puts most “high-quality civilian childcare centers” out of reach for many military personnel, especially juniors.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military is struggling to meet recruitment goals. The Army missed its target by 15,000 people last year, and the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy are also struggling with declining interest and eligibility.

Not wanting to lose expensively trained talent, the Pentagon operates the largest employer-sponsored child care program in the U.S., serving approximately 160,000 children and employing more than 23,600 workers at an annual cost of more than $1 billion.

It is subsidized and waiting lists can last months. The Pentagon is aiming to reduce these numbers by, among other things, building more than a dozen new child care centers across the country with money from the Pentagon’s latest spending bill. This construction takes an average of three years.

However, the physical buildings are less of a problem than the chronic staff shortage. Background checks alone can be “very lengthy,” taking as long as nine months, said Caitlin Hamon, former deputy director of government relations at the National Military Families Association.

For this reason, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced last year that the Pentagon’s budget would include measures to recruit and retain child care workers by allowing them to enroll their own children in centers in to write.

They also receive top priority for spaces at the base facilities where they work, even ahead of single military parents and dual military couples.

Because military families move about every three years, the Pentagon also sets up programs to reimburse service members for childcare costs associated with their frequent moves.

For example, if they can’t get child care within 30 days of arriving in a new home, the military will give $500 to U.S. troops or $1,500 for those posted abroad to fly out a family member or other trusted caregiver.

Still, “asking a family member to give up what he or she is doing and care for your children for free is not a good solution,” said Ms. Corbitt, who founded a nonprofit, Operation Child Care, to help, among other things, information about navigating the system to military families. The organization also provides grants to help families pay for waitlist or application fees during transition periods.

“It’s often less than $1,500 that makes the difference between being able to hold down a job or finish school” and having child care, she adds.

Reliance on “unpaid labor”

After coming to the U.S. from El Salvador as a young girl, Patty Barron watched her mother, a recent widow, struggle to find a place for her children during the long hours she worked to put food on the table.

“Childcare was wherever she could find it, with whomever she could find it. Sometimes it was great, and sometimes it wasn’t so great,” Mrs. Barron recalled. By the time she was 10 years old, Mrs. Barron was caring for her younger brother and sister.

Today, as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Military Community and Family Policy, she is the Pentagon’s point person overseeing military child care policy — and a working military spouse who for years had a personal perspective on child care.

“I have followed my soldier for 30 years and I can tell you that I see no change in demand.” That’s in large part because, as now, about 40% of active duty service members have children. The largest percentage of those children are 5 years or younger.

“So you can imagine how important it is to have access to affordable, quality care,” Ms. Barron notes.

In 1978, the Department of Defense took on formal responsibility for establishing childcare centers for its troops. In the 1980s, the military began pouring more money into it after research showed that the majority of Pentagon daycare centers were not meeting safety regulations or “sanitation standards.”

Today, demand for these services far exceeds supply. “They’re great if you have access to them,” said Ms. Corbitt, who estimates that in her experience, fewer than 30% of military parents are able to secure a spot in primary care.

In the meantime, she says, the military is still, as it was decades ago, “heavily dependent on the unpaid labor of spouses” to pick up the slack.

Promising start of pilot programs

In the halls of the Pentagon, officials say they are most encouraged by pilot programs to expand the availability of child care.

Previously, the only centers the Pentagon was eligible for reimbursement were the approximately 10% of America’s licensed child care programs that are nationally accredited.

“That’s a low number,” said Stacey Young, who oversees child development programs as director of the Pentagon’s Office of Military Family Readiness Policy.

“Accreditation is not cheap,” she adds. “But just because a program is not accredited does not mean it is not a quality program. … We really had to find a way to expand our capacity.”

The trick is to do this without sacrificing quality. In that quest, the Pentagon has begun “piggybacking” on programs states have already put in place to measure and improve their centers — including providing quality assessments — and then “cross-breeding” them with Pentagon standards, says Ms. Young.

If they join, military families are eligible for reimbursement. Currently, the program, which was ramped up after the pandemic, is active in nine states.

According to Ms. Barron, the Pentagon has a responsibility to ensure that military families receive quality care when and where they need it. “What you don’t want is what my mother went through,” she says.

Ensuring that service members can focus on their jobs is a national security imperative, she says, and spouses — many of whom work in child care centers — know that too, Ms. Barron added.

“They bring a tremendous amount of love and attention to our children because they understand the lifestyle,” which – with frequent moves for children and parents often away on assignments – “is not easy.”