Andrew Hyde woke up to an empty, quiet house. He made coffee and took his dog, Ellie Mae, for a run. The trails near his home in Boulder’s foothills were mostly empty on this mid-winter weekday.
Hyde, 42, is far removed from the world of play dates and nap times. Most of his days involve little to no interaction with children; some of his friends are parents, but he sees them infrequently. As a self-employed, semi-retired tech and startup founder, he doesn’t even need to fight school traffic as he heads down Sunshine Canyon to run errands, and there are few kids around town on a Friday afternoon.
“I know very little” about Colorado’s child care crisis, Hyde said. One thing he does know is the status quo doesn’t seem to be working — for anyone.
“I notice it because it’s a broken system,” he said. “I notice it because my friends are struggling.”
Due to availability or cost, — nearly one-quarter of all kids under 5 — and to accommodate a lack of care. When they can get it, families pay, on average, to place their kids in licensed facilities. Single parents can spend nearly half their take-home pay finding somewhere safe for their children to be during the day.
Save for the passing interest of an engaged citizen, Hyde’s life is not impacted by the shortage of licensed child care providers and the soaring prices impacting parents across Colorado and the nation. That’s a feeling shared by many: In a recent survey by Denver-based Corona Insights, 65% of child-free Coloradans said the availability of affordable child care had zero impact on their lives.
But as he goes about his life, Hyde crosses paths with people whose lives are dependent on access to child care. To document this, Hyde allowed a photographer and reporter to follow him around for an afternoon, tracing the different ways his own life is supported by parents and the people who take care of their children.
12:45 p.m. — Skratch Labs Cafe
Hyde stood in line at in Boulder, waiting to order lunch, when he made his first connection to child care: Jodi Lillis, eating at a nearby table.
A Realtor and mother of two, Lillis once helped Hyde sell a home in north Boulder. She and her spouse have high-paying jobs that allow them to set their own schedules, for the most part, making child care easier. For nearly $4,000 per month, both boys attend a local, daily Montessori school that includes summer hours.
Even so, there are sick days, holidays — federal and administrative — and the unexpected, such as a recent lockdown at a nearby high school (thankfully, a false alarm) or weather-related power outages that require parents to pick up their kids early.
“Itap extremely challenging to balance” work and parenthood, said Lillis’ husband, Ryan. “Even if you’re in a job where they understand parenting and profess to support it, when life gets in the way, you have to find a way to make up for that on your own time to make sure you’re meeting the needs of the job.”
“You have to be pretty flexible,” Jodi Lillis said.
Flexibility is a luxury most American parents don’t have. According to , four in 10 American workers have “little to no control” over their work schedules. Just 35% have high-quality work schedules like Lillis and her husband: predictable, steady hours and some say over when they work and the ability to take time off for personal reasons.
Remote and hybrid work options left over from the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in record-high participation of women and mothers in the U.S. workforce, : 77.7% of women aged 25 to 54 are employed. Employment of mothers with children under 5 remains above pre-pandemic levels.
The Lillises know how privileged they are to have the careers and child care options they do. Since becoming a parent, Jodi Lillis thinks a lot about other moms and dads without accommodating jobs or the resources to pay for daily child care and summer camps.
“Unless you have really good family support or a less expensive babysitter,” she said, “I really don’t know how families make it work.”
It took becoming a parent for Karen Manahan to truly understand how integral child care is to a community. Like Hyde, she was always an informed and engaged citizen, more tuned in than your average American to the troubles of the day, “but it became crystal clear to me once child care was a direct need that I had.”
In addition to her day job as community engagement manager for Google, Manahan also serves on the board of Boulder Day Nursery, where her daughter attends day care five days a week. Parents of other children there fill multiple roles in every sector of the economy, she said.
“I’ve had my eyes opened,” Manahan said. “I can’t unsee the way that we all rely on it. I really see it as an essential infrastructure.”
After being contacted for this story, Hyde donated to Boulder Day as part of his annual end-of-year giving. He wanted to help families, he said, because of how difficult modern parenthood seems to be.
“It’s so (expletive) hard to be a parent these days. Every single thing about it seems to be stacked against you.”
1 p.m. — Alive and Well
There is mold in Hyde’s veins.
Well, maybe not. But after discovering the toxic black fungus growing behind his dishwasher during a remodel, he isn’t taking any chances.
His next stop after a quick lunch was the nearby pharmacy, . There, he had half a pint of blood drained from his body, mixed in a bag with ozone gas and dripped back in. The entire process, called IV ozone therapy, takes nearly an hour. Hyde hopes it will kill whatever mold may be lingering in his body.
Amanda Frederick, a mother of two, oversaw the procedure. Frederick shares custody 50/50 with her children’s father. When her girls, 6 and 8, aren’t in school, a mix of summer camps and family fills in the gaps.
“I have a lot of support,” Frederick said. “My parents are really helpful.”
This type of “informal” care is so common that it has its own name and acronym: FFN, or care. The state defines FFN providers as non-licensed child-care providers who serve four or fewer children at a time.
“In Colorado, it is estimated that more than half of the children are in the care of FFN providers,” a says. That figure is higher among low-wage and shift workers, since FFN is often low-cost or free of charge.
In Hyde’s home county of Boulder, daily care during typical business hours at a licensed facility costs $1,645 per kid, per month, on average. Thatap a total annual cost of $19,740 — the highest in the state, according to a , a free-market research organization.
Thousands of families can afford care only because of funding from the federal government, administered in Colorado through the Child Care Assistance Program, or CCAP. Twenty percent of Boulder Day’s tuition payments come from that government aid, according to Manahan.
When the Trump administration cut CCAP in January, it threatened even families who can afford to pay full price. The funding is ongoing while Colorado challenges the policy in court, but if reductions are made permanent, Mahanan predicts a wave of day care closures, almost overnight.
The “rippling impacts” of loss of care would be felt broadly, she said: Parents, likely women, dropping out of the workforce, creating staffing shortages across the board. In a high-cost community like Boulder County, having a stay-at-home parent isn’t always an option.
Even with her well-paid position at Google, “I frankly feel like if we didn’t have access to child care and we were a single-income family household, we likely wouldn’t be able to live in Boulder,” Manahan said. “It wouldn’t be affordable for us, either.”
2-4 p.m. — Sunshine Canyon
At Hyde’s house in Sunshine Canyon, just west of Boulder, Warren Breuer worked on rebuilding an exterior wall just off the main bedroom and attached porch.
He was solo this day, but when school is out, he’ll often have his daughter in tow. Many of his clients live in mountain communities, where the more rural homes have options for kids to entertain themselves.
“Most of the summer, she goes to work with me,” Breuer said. “Most places that I go, everybody’s super relaxed. So they just let her hang out, play with their dogs, their horses, the goats, and their own kids.”
From his friends with children, Hyde has learned the high demand and “astronomical price” of summer camps, a crucial source of care when school is out. He knows the more desirable programs will be full by February. He’s even paid directly for his friends’ kids to attend, a gesture he calls “my uncle duty to the world.”
Hyde is driven to help as much as he can, aware of his extraordinary circumstances as a single man with money and influence. Child care, he said, “affects your quality of life like nothing else.”
“As we’ve been going around today, we’ve seen a lot of people that have kids in school today, and who are only able to do their job because of their child care situation,” Hyde said.
A single father, Breuer’s flexible schedule as a handyman allows him the freedom to pick his daughter up from school and spend evenings and weekends with her at their Longmont home, but being self-employed also has its drawbacks.
Sick days for his daughter mean “I just don’t go to work,” Breuer said.
It also means a missed paycheck.
Lapses in child care cost workers and the economy. In Colorado, where 65% of families with children under 5 have “all available parents” working, gaps in care will cost the state’s workers an estimated $5 billion in lost earnings through 2035, according to at the University of Nebraska.
Taking care of children is “the work behind the work,” Manahan said — ”essential infrastructure to how society functions.” Until and unless more people, like Hyde, recognize their own connections to child care, the vast network of parents, kids and caregivers will remain unappreciated and under-resourced.
“It’s not something that we’re recognizing is a public good instead of a private luxury,” she said. “It is invisible.”
