Opinion | Our day care system is broken. Here's how we fix it.

The Boston Globe · Jeffrey Liebman · 2026-11-04 08:00 UTC

High costs, impossibly long waitlists, and a whole bunch of frustrated parents. Here’s how Massachusetts can lead the nation on one of its most pressing challenges.

Jeffrey Liebman is the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston.

Aubrey Harnett started worrying about day care as soon as she became pregnant with her first child. “I started putting our name down on wait lists even before my first OB appointment,” she tells me. “I called 75 places. Home care. Day-care centers. Everything.”

Some of the places she saw were out of the question. “At one, I saw kids sitting on a dirty rug watching TV,” she says. Others had endless wait lists. And when her son was born, she still hadn’t found a slot.

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