This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.
When Payton Kinnison found out she was pregnant with twins, she didn't waste a moment. Eight weeks into her pregnancy, she put her unborn children on the waitlist for on-base child care at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs, where her toddler Ronan was already enrolled.
The staff assured Kinnison that since her husband was on active duty and she worked full time, the twins' priority level was high enough to ensure them spots by summertime.
The plan seemed solid. And all throughout her pregnancy and until the twins were 10 weeks old, Kinnison wasn't worried. There was no reason to be. She received no notices or updates -- nothing to warn her the babies' spots were in jeopardy.
But an email at the end of May derailed everything. Just days before she was due to return to her dental office job, the on-base child care center informed her the twins would not have spots -- until May 2026.
"I was in a panic," Kinninson said. "I had to quit my job. And I had to find a work-from-home job because I had nobody to watch my twins."
Military families and on-base child care providers have known for a long time that theirs is a system delicately balanced on a wobbling foundation, made shakier by the frequent moves of its primary pool of employees -- military spouses.
But suddenly, the country's largest employer-sponsored child care system was upended by staffing shortages that rippled from base to base after a DOD-wide hiring freeze announced in late February prevented centers from filling vacancies. Even though child care providers were exempted from the freeze three weeks after it was announced, the damage has persisted for months.
Military child care waitlists around the country remain frozen--oftentimes providing no notice to parents who are counting on care.
"It's really setting families up for failure," said Kayla Corbitt, the founder and CEO of Operation Child Care Project, a nonprofit that advocates and provides child care case management services for 50 to 60 DOD families at a time nationwide. "This is happening at almost every installation, but they're not telling anyone."
The War Horse spoke with 10 military parents in four states to understand how the freeze continues to affect families, and how they are grappling with the uncertainty of a system that was so easily upended.
Some families found out about the military child care crisis in the worst way; at bases in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, children were unenrolled from day cares that needed the spots for families with higher needs, such as ones with single parents or both spouses on active duty.
The impact has been especially acute at Air and Space Force bases with high-capacity centers where off-base options are limited. Peterson, where Kinnison was counting on sending her twins, closed an infant room. More than 30 children lost their spots at Hill Air Force Base in Northern Utah. In the Florida panhandle, Eglin Air Force Base reduced its hours, leaving families struggling to make up the difference.
At Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, New Mexico, some mothers left the on-base child care center in an angry daze on May 9 after being asked to sign termination paperwork for their children. They walked out past a coffee cart handing out free drinks; it was Military Spouse Appreciation Day.
While Defense Department policy guarantees families 45 days' notice if their child is being "supplanted" by military families with higher priority for on-base care, the parents notified on May 9 were given only nine more days of care.
A System That Can't Recover Quickly
The consequences of losing on-base child care have been bruising for many parents, like DOD engineer David Comber in Utah, whose child care costs went from $210 per week to $605 after his son was kicked out of a DOD child care center.
One New Mexico mom told The War Horse she felt no choice but to resign from her job as a physician's assistant when her son lost his spot in on-base care. She asked to be identified by her initials, A.T., because her active-duty Air Force husband feared retaliation at work.
The Department of Defense declined to make anyone available for an interview with The War Horse. Instead, it said in a statement that the department remains focused on providing quality child care to military families through multiple methods, including helping families find and pay for care in community-based centers and working with nonprofits to run centers for military families.
That the military child care system could grind to a halt in a matter of weeks might surprise civilian parents, who often assume DOD families have ready access to high-quality care centers without the exorbitant tuition fees and long waitlists nonmilitary families have become accustomed to.
The DOD has stated that it views child care as critical to the military's mission readiness. The department has worked for more than 30 years to shape its child care system into one that is safe, high-quality, and affordable for 200,000 children of DOD civilians and servicemembers.
Yet this "gold standard" system is deeply marred by a lack of accessibility; at any given time, one out of every five military families in need of child care can't find any.
When Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, questioned the chiefs of each military branch at a hearing on Capitol Hill last year about waiting lists ballooning to more than 12,000 children for DOD child care, she drilled down on one problem: "The DOD [child care] centers are there ... but the staffing shortages are so bad that centers are accepting 30% fewer children than they could if they had full staffing."
While civilian centers struggle to find quality staff who will stick around, military installations are at an even greater disadvantage; their primary source of employees--military spouses--is constantly moving away. More than 400,000 military families are on the move every year--about a third of the active duty armed forces.
That makes staffing challenging, even in good times. And a required teacher-to-children ratio (depending on children's ages) dictates how many rooms can open, whether on-post or off. Before the freeze, parents at some bases already noticed issues related to understaffing.
"When we first moved here, we were on waitlists forever, and they were forever long," said Jessica Farmer, a health care consultant who arrived in Colorado Springs in the spring of 2022 with her active-duty Army husband and two daughters.
Months later, after her daughter Ryann finally got a spot in Schriever Space Force Base's Child Development Center, Farmer watched as kids and staff got shuffled from classroom to classroom each day based on the number of teachers available.
Congress mandated the DOD provide families an anticipated wait time when they apply for on-base care. But parents say the date range is vague and unreliable. Like the year-long range Army Sgt. Anthony Castorina was given after he tried to enroll his son, Barrett, at the Fort Carson Child Development Center.
Castorina found off-base care for Barrett while keeping an eye on the waitlist. "The only direction we went on that list was down," he said.
Now when he checks the military's child care site, it says Barrett will never get in.
"It was already an uphill battle, and that was in perfect conditions," said Corbitt, the child care advocate. "I do not foresee this recovering any time quickly."
Long-Term Effects of the Freeze
On March 12, amid the hiring freeze, Comber received notice that his son Ethan had seven more days before he would be disenrolled from care at Hill Air Force Base.
When Comber arrived to pick up Ethan on his last day at Hill's on-base center, he watched him as he happily climbed in and out of his favorite toy: the little red ride-on car with the yellow roof. Teachers sang and danced with the children to KidzBop songs.
"Ethan just had a big smile on his face, and was happy," Comber said. "And I was sad to be taking him away."
Comber and his wife, Shawna, who works as a clinical audiologist at a VA hospital, scrambled to find other child care. They paid to put Ethan's name on a bunch of local day care waitlists and were relieved when a nationally accredited child care chain found Ethan a spot.
Comber rushed to update his care needs in the military's online portal, militarychildcare.com, so that the family could use military financial assistance to pay for Ethan's tuition at the civilian center. But three months later, he has yet to get approval. Their monthly child care bill went from around $840 to $2,420--the equivalent of a second mortgage.
"The discretionary income we had is all going towards that," Comber said. "It feels like we're getting by, and that's kind of incredulous, because we both have advanced degrees. We're both working full time, and we're just getting by."
The Combers had hoped to move out of their starter home, especially since they welcomed their third child this month. Now, that move is frozen too. "We're just kind of stuck right where we are for the long term," he said.
Down in New Mexico, A.T. was one of the professional moms who found out her son was being removed from a long-awaited spot in Holloman's child development center.
"It's been an absolute nightmare," she said. "Because who do you trust in nine business days to take care of your kid?"
She found a spot for him at a local preschool, but like many civilian day cares, it doesn't open early enough to accommodate the needs of military families. A.T. had to hire a college student to take her son to preschool and pick him up afterward. The family's child-care costs tripled.
With so much uncertainty and a requirement to give her employer 90 days' notice, A.T. quit her job. "I can't just hope for the best," she said.
For a few weeks longer, she'll spend her days helping patients on the operating table, feeling the gratification of seeing problems and fixing them. She wonders if anyone is fighting to fix the military child care system that let her family down.
"People get better," she said. "But this system continuously stays broken."
A Hearts and Minds Situation
The DOD had been working to build new centers, recruit more teachers, and entice additional spouses to get certified as Family Child Care providers who watch children in their homes on base.
Corbitt says after the freeze, that progress is lost. "The momentum that they gained over these last few years ... it's all for nothing," she said.
For parents who feel betrayed by the system, it might not matter how quickly installations hire new teachers or recruit military spouses to become caregivers. They need care now.
Corbitt thinks parents will start turning to civilian day cares, adding to those centers' waitlist woes. In the long run, she says, the greatest casualty of the hiring freeze could be the loss of confidence in the system.
"You're going to have to convince them that it's still worth it to start the process, to work at these places, or it's still worth it to enroll your children, knowing they may be supplanted at any given time."
That loss of trust is already happening. At Fort Carson, Castorina said if his son finally got off that child care waitlist, he wouldn't take the spot.
The military's child care system, he said, "is not dependent on market conditions, it's entirely dependent on political winds. And because those are unpredictable, there isn't a lot of stability in a system like that."
This War Horse story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.
Jennifer Brookland is a regular contributor to The War Horse who served as a special agent in the Air Force before she received her master's in journalism from Columbia University. She's covered military and veterans' issues for North Carolina Public Radio and child welfare for the Detroit Free Press. She was also a 2022 War Horse Fellow.
Editors Note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.
