New Mexico demonstrates family values in new legislation

The week of Sept. 8 was peppered with bad news: Another school shooting was overshadowed by the murder of a political influencer, and folks had a lot to say about the latter and much less about the former.

We wallow in gun violence until it becomes the air that we breathe.

All that bad news obscured a piece of good news from the state of New Mexico, news that affects its everyday citizens in ways that will pay dividends for years.

On Sept. 8, New Mexico’s Early Childhood Education and Care Department (ECECD) announced that beginning November 1, 2025, the state “will offer universal access to no-cost childcare.” Read that again: universal access to no-cost childcare. In other words, FREE.

Incidentally, I love the name of the department. It strikes the right chord because all children deserve education and care to give them the best start in life. Excellent childcare involves more than just a place to park your kid while you go to work.

Having access to childcare, at any price, is a challenge for working parents, and for low wage earners, childcare costs can eat up the bulk of a parent’s earnings. For a single parent family, it can be crippling. New Mexico lifted that burden for low-income families several years ago.

Following the establishment of the ECECD in 2019, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham and the state legislature offered “no-cost childcare to families with incomes at or below 400% of the federal poverty level.”

Now the state is saying that no matter what you earn, if you have children, and you work, you will not have to pay for childcare.

This is a public good. In a state that consistently ranks last in education and third in poverty levels, it’s an investment in the betterment of New Mexico. It says that New Mexico values its children, and they want them to get a good start in life. It says that the state values its families and wants them to have economic security.

Of course there will be pushback, but the people pushing back tend to be those that want to shove women out of the workplace, to make the need for childcare non-existent. They want to dictate women’s choices and to structure society in a tightly proscribed manner.

There may also be pushback in asking where the money is coming from to support no-cost childcare. New Mexico is known as an “oil and gas state” and they receive revenue from those resources. With current high prices for those commodities, that provides a slush fund for years when prices are low.

The state also has money from a land grant permanent fund and an early childhood trust fund to help pay for expanding childcare. This expansion will enable hiring more workers, paying them higher wages, building new childcare centers, and reimbursing existing centers 100% for their services.

This is revolutionary. As more families struggle to put food on the table, it gives them hope, and it gives their children a better start in life. A better start means more opportunities and a way out of poverty.

Even for families who can afford daycare, such a plan can mean buying a better car for more reliable transportation to the job, going back to school to get a better job, or buying a first house.

New Mexico’s population is 2.13 million, compared to Iowa’s 3.24 million. Iowa doesn’t have oil and gas money, but other states that do aren’t using it to invest in children and families like New Mexico is, according to Hailey Heinz, deputy director of the Cradle to Career Policy Institute at the University of New Mexico.

Couldn’t Iowa do something, though? If Rob Sand were elected governor, perhaps he could find some funds. It’s clear that Iowa could use help, too, as our educational status continues to slide. We could do more to provide a better life for Iowa’s children and their families.

One of my grandsons attends a wonderful daycare center. It’s bright and clean and well-staffed, and they provide children with a rich learning environment, but it costs my daughter and her husband close to $15,000 a year. When Baby Number Two arrives in a few months, that figure will double.

While they are lucky to afford that hefty bill, it still makes a sizable budgetary dent. Having two in daycare next year means that other things will be more difficult, like saving for a better car or a proper vacation.

When I told her about New Mexico, she said, “I’m not even asking for free childcare.” She just wants a break in the cost, some breathing room, a chance to save more or pay down their mortgage so they can think about buying a bigger house. You know, the American dream stuff.

Anymore, the American dream seems like a castle in the clouds. Rising prices for groceries, utilities, and housing puts the American dream further out of reach for more families.

New Mexico’s decision to offer free childcare should have been big nationwide news. It should have been touted as a piece of legislation for other states to study and learn from. It should have been a topic of much conversation and debate with all the pushback of the “s-word.”

Instead, all eyes were elsewhere.

Joan Zwagerman celebrates New Mexico's forward-looking policy for children and families.