Even as the right touts natalism and tradwife values, taking care of children in America has never been a more expensive or challenging proposition: a 2024 study conducted by the Department of Labor found that American families spend between 8.9% and 16.0% of their median income on full-day care for just one child. At least one state in the country, though, isn’t willing to accept the White House’s rollbacks on programs like Head Start; in New Mexico, families will have access to no-cost universal childcare beginning in November.
Ahead of the initiative’s rollout, Vogue spoke to New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham about her own family’s struggles to afford childcare, her plans for making New Mexico a “cradle-to-career investment state,” and how she sees the Trump administration’s legislative priorities negatively affecting children and families in New Mexico and across the country.
Vogue: As a mother of two, do you think New Mexico’s new free-childcare initiative would have helped you when your kids were younger?
Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham: Oh, no question. I’ll be 66 this month, and when I was earlier in my career, you weren’t allowed to miss work. I wasn’t allowed to have my kids’ pictures at work. They could ask you if you were pregnant or planning to be pregnant, you could not talk about your family or their health, and I am a lawyer, so it was not a good climate for women. I struggled to figure out how to pay for childcare, and when I ran for governor in 2018, it was part of the platform to get an early childhood cabinet up and running, but nothing brings it home like your own children. I’m a grandmother, and my daughter is lucky, but navigating childcare, finding it, and paying $1,800 a month—it’s crazy expensive, more than her mortgage. She’s fine, but this is an issue for young families that is at least partially responsible for declining birth rates and families struggling to figure out equity in their lives, whether that’s starting a business, or going back to school to change their career, or buying a house, or what have you. You just can’t make any of those choices. This was a 2018 commitment, and we got it all done before I’m leaving this job, and I’m really excited about it and very proud that we are a cradle-to-career investment state in New Mexican families.
The initiative begins on November 1, right? Could you walk me through the rollout a little bit?
Everyone’s included, starting on November 1, but New Mexico already provides more support than any other state in the nation. I think there’s a notion that I snapped my fingers and we created universal child care, but we’ve been very methodical so that it stays, and so that this building block can be here forever. I’ve put every governor and every legislator in a position to have it funded, supported, built, available, and ready. Right now, if you’re at 400% of poverty or lower, childcare is free; other folks, you pay for the cost of childcare, but no other copays or fees can be attached. We’re covering the costs and incentivizing quality, and we also pay our providers to [ensure] we’re going to have a workforce for a long time. We’ve seen a 64% increase in providers because we license you, train you, certify you, and we also have childcare training programs in community colleges and universities and a Center of Excellence for that at Western New Mexico University that’s fully free and fully paid for.
We have a really robust infrastructure, and on November 1, anyone who’s currently paying for childcare stops paying for it and it becomes universally free. That means that 12,000 additional New Mexico families and kiddos will be eligible for free childcare. That’s ages zero to 12, so we’re going to pay for before-school dropoffs, we’re going to pay for after-school programs. We’re going to pay for infant and toddler programs. Three and four-year-olds are already covered in our universal pre-K program, which is one of the best in the nation, and UCLA has just done a study showing that 75% of our kindergartners are ready for kindergarten or exceeding readiness levels, which is a game-changer for a state that has long struggled with poverty and hasn’t been able to move the needle. The last thing we are incentivizing and paying for is keeping childcare centers open for 10 hours. This allows parents to have stability in the workplace and go back to college and think about different careers. I’m very excited about what this does for families.
Do you have short and long-term hopes for this initiative?
If you get kids ready for kindergarten and elementary school, it is always a game-changer in your proficiency outcomes. I learned as a governor, and it’s appalling to me, that here in New Mexico we don’t teach the science of reading, or we didn’t; we do now. I tutor with a program that worked with 17,000 kids last summer, and all those kids had double-digit increases in their literacy outcomes. We require that you teach the science of reading in K through 12, we’ve reinvested in retraining our K through eighth-grade educators, and we’re building a state-of-the-art literacy institute in Albuquerque. We’ll be giving kids full scholarships for tutoring and mentoring. We’re going to build a math institute to tutor kids in math. We’re going to do the bricks and mortar of what a school system is always rooted in, so that it’s more developmental in New Mexico.
I predict—I’m a bit bullish, and I don’t know if I’ll get those outcomes while I’m governor, but doesn’t matter—I think New Mexico is going to be the place where educational outcomes shift in a way that real stability and developmental outcomes occur, and then a lineup of better graduation rates in college will also occur. I think it’s why businesses are coming here. I think it’s why they’re really excited about our investments. It’s been a very methodical enterprise.
How do you see the second Trump administration affecting the childcare and early childhood education initiatives that you’re working to build out?
They’re backing away from their responsibility in public education and they’re backing away from special education, which creates equality. New Mexico’s got one of the highest vaccine rates in the country for kindergarteners, but seeing the federal government back away from science, back away from investments in maternal health, in environmental toxins, back away from vaccines, back away from anti-poverty programs for states that improve child wellbeing, is so sinister and wrong in my mind.
We are literally creating a bigger minority divide for a melting-pot country. It makes no sense. Who builds this country and who are the folks behind small businesses? These are minority small-business owners. New Mexico is going to be a shining star in this regard; we’re going to lean in full-throttle and with our permanent funds and our early childhood trust fund, which is $9 billion. We’re putting real money where our mouth is in creating stability. But it doesn’t have to cost states so much if we all work together to put the federal government and Congress back in a position where they’re true partners in getting families out of poverty. People not being able to keep their health care coverage creates instability, unhealthy families, more money spent in emergency rooms, more risk for states, and none of this is good for children.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
