New Mexico is known for a lot of things – desert landscapes, a vibrant culture, and tasty sopapillas. New to the list of distinctions: It’s the first and only U.S. state to offer free care for every child under age 5, regardless of family income.

The Land of Enchantment’s adoption of universal childcare last fall was cause for celebration among the current and former government officials, researchers, and business leaders gathered at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) for a recent policy forum on childcare affordability. Childcare ranks high on the list of costs fueling America’s affordability crisis, along with gas, groceries, healthcare, and housing. For low-income families, research shows that childcare soaks up as much as one-third of their expenses.

Finding solutions to childcare’s cost crunch is difficult, especially when it involves infants and toddlers. And with federal reform efforts stalled amid cuts to social services, states and local governments are seizing the spotlight. New Mexico’s move to universal childcare is by far the most expansive reform, but other states and cities are making significant strides, too – among them Vermont, Connecticut, Alaska, Hawaii, and New York. San Francisco just became the first U.S. city to provide free childcare for working families.

Worries about the high costs of living combined with groundbreaking reforms at the state and local level signal that childcare reform “is at an inflection point,” Neale Mahoney, the Trione Director of SIEPR, told the audience at the April 16 event. “Momentum is building.”

But there isn’t a plug-and-play roadmap for fixing childcare, which is why experts from around the country came to Stanford to talk about the challenges, share insights into what works and what doesn’t, and hear directly from leaders of childcare reform efforts in New Mexico, Vermont, and San Francisco.

“Trailblazers around the country are showing us that expanding childcare can be done in a way which benefits families, aids child development, and supports childcare workers without breaking the budget,” said Mahoney, who is also the TG Wijaya Professor of Economics in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, in remarks kicking off the event.

Lessons from policymakers

To childcare advocates, New Mexico represents the holy grail of what’s possible. In a keynote speech at the policy forum, Elizabeth Groginsky, New Mexico’s inaugural secretary for early childhood education, opened up about her state’s journey to universal coverage for infants and toddlers. She touched on the key ingredients enabling reform: political will, enormous sums of money, coalition-building, uneasy trade-offs, and rigorous evaluation.

An early step that Groginsky says was also critical: consolidating the state’s early childhood programs into a cabinet-level department.

“Fragmentation was holding us back,” she said. Bringing all of its childcare services under one roof not only streamlined processes for families and providers but also “gave us the ability to measure whether the system was working.” This meant tracking the impact on enrollment rates, family stability, educator turnover, and children’s well-being.

In California, some 600,000 children don’t have access to affordable quality care, said Mia Bonta, a state assemblymember who chairs the California Legislative Children’s Caucus and was also a featured keynote speaker. “Our childcare market, as it stands right now, is fragile, underpaid, and underappreciated,” she said.

But money alone is not the answer, she continued. Regulatory and structural changes are also needed to ensure kids receive quality care so they’re ready and able to learn when kindergarten starts. To get there, Bonta echoed Groginsky: The state needs to coordinate with the myriad agencies providing childcare services, reduce red tape for providers, and commit to long-term funding while streamlining sources of that funding.

San Francisco uses revenues from a voter-approved tax on commercial rents to fund its new expansion of childcare subsidies. Other recent reforms are focused not just on costs but also on quality, by raising, for example, wages for childcare workers, said Kunal Modi, the city and county’s chief of health and human services and a featured speaker at the policy forum.

Modi’s message to childcare reformists: “The policy design matters as much as the commitment.”

San Francisco sees childcare for infants and toddlers – and livable wages for care providers – as “economic infrastructure,” Modi said.

And its commitment stems from research showing that early childhood support can have lasting benefits for individuals. It’s also a response to another reality: Young families leave big cities they can’t afford to live in. “We know that economic mobility is not random,” he said.

New tools from academia

When it comes to policy design, governments are getting a big lift from advances in research grounded in identifying what’s possible instead of analyzing what’s already happened. On that front, SIEPR will soon release a childcare model that identifies specific reforms and measures what their impacts would be on a number of key outcomes, including how many stay-at-home mothers would return to the labor market and how much childcare worker earnings would rise.

Aaron Sojourner, a featured speaker and labor economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, said the research is entering “a bold new world.”

As the policy forum revealed, so too is government-supported childcare.