For as long as anyone remembers, no childcare center on Kauaʻi has had a single opening for an infant or toddler. Not one.
On this tropical island lush with vegetation, the childcare landscape is desolate. Kauaʻi is the only major Hawaiian island that has gone without center-based infant and toddler care for most of the past 15 years if not more — the data just doesn’t go back any further.
There are spots on the island’s military base, but those are reserved for military families. There have historically been about 22 licensed home-based childcare centers that could also take infants and toddlers, but they’re limited to only two children under 18 months; most choose to only have one infant or none at all. That amounts to about 10 to 14 seats for the 700 babies who are born on the island every year. And hiring a nanny on Kaua’i is a prohibitive cost for many: The going rate is between $35 and $40 an hour.
On the mainland, if parents are in a childcare desert, they often get around it by driving to the next nearest town or moving neighborhoods to be near family. On Kauaʻi, there’s nowhere to go without leaving the tiny island behind. So parents have made it work because they had to. Families living intergenerationally relied on each other to help with the care. Grandmas and aunties stepped in to help. Moms took their kids to work with them or they found a job that they could do from home to give them more flexibility. In many cases, moms left the labor force altogether.
This has gone on so long that it has become an accepted way of life.
Across Hawai’i, more than half of parents report leaving their jobs due to childcare challenges, according to a 2025 survey by the Chamber of Commerce Hawai’i. On Kauaʻi, “it is a very stressful situation, and in most cases it’s going to be the mother that has to to quit her job and stay at home and it puts on an additional burden to the family financially,” said Carol Wear, the executive director of PATCH, Hawai’i’s childcare resource and referral agency.
The situation came to a head during the pandemic, which decimated the scant childcare options on Kaua’i. Five home-based childcare centers had shuttered by 2023. Families’ finances got tighter after the island’s top industry, tourism, shut down for much of 2020. An already unwieldy housing affordability problem ballooned. Fewer families could afford to have one parent home not working to care for their child.
Faced with a need that was growing more desperate, the island’s first known infant and toddler spots opened up by 2024. The Kauaʻi Montessori Project, a preschool in Līhuʻe, the county seat, opened 12 infant and toddler spots thanks to some grant funding that came through during the pandemic. Then an Early Head Start center serving the lowest-income children — the island’s first — opened in 2025 with eight infant and toddler spots. Coming soon is a third center, a renovated grocery store space, that the county decided to turn solely into an infant-toddler center in response to the need. It will open with 32 seats for kids ages 6 weeks to 3 years old early next year.
That brings the count of infant-toddler spots to about 30 currently — still only enough for about 4 percent of the island’s infants. For the Head Start center, the kids on that waitlist alone could fill three more centers, said Novelyn Hinazumi, the director of Kauaʻi programs at Child & Family Service, the nonprofit that operates Head Start programs on the island.
“This shortage has placed enormous strain on families, contributed to workforce loss and increased community awareness of the need for systemic change,” said Natasha Perry, the county’s early childhood coordinator.
For moms, it has put into question whether their families can continue to live on Kauaʻi at all.
Aakara Wiegand, a single mom of a 2-year-old who has lived in Hawai’i for 15 years, has to take her daughter with her to work at a rental car company. With her other business running wellness retreats, she can only do about half as many events because she can barely manage it with her toddler.
The nanny rates are unaffordable, Wiegand said. And even finding a nanny at the last minute is difficult. She had one nanny lined up for an upcoming colonoscopy, but the nanny had to travel, so Wiegand was forced to cancel her appointment.
It has put severe strain on her life, she said: “I have basically stopped doing things.”
Even more complicated is the fact that her toddler is receiving early intervention services for her speech and social emotional development. The very few options on the island don’t often cater to children who need additional support, Wiegand said. Last year, she was able to get her daughter a spot at a daycare, but she only lasted there four days. “She just couldn’t emotionally fit in that group, but it was the only option available. So that was frustrating at that time,” Wiegand said.
With no family or support on the island, Wiegand is starting to research a move to North Carolina in the next year. Becoming a parent has changed her experience on Kaua’i.
“It’s just not a very sustainable environment anymore,” she said. “It’s definitely taken a toll on me.”
Part of how Kauaʻi found itself with such a severe infant and toddler care shortage is a familiar story. In Kauaʻi, like much of the country, infant and toddler spots are harder to offer because no one makes money from them. Per Hawai’i’s licensing rules, there needs to be one teacher for every four infants in each infant-toddler classroom, which makes staffing expensive.
But on this island, there’s also a space problem.
Hawai’i’s licensing guidelines require 35 square feet of play or instructional space per child as well as 75 square feet of outdoor space per child, not unlike what most other states require. In most places that’s not a big constraint, but on an island 33 miles wide with a massive housing shortage, real estate is tight.
Mandie Gibson, the principal of the Koloa Early School, a preschool on the south part of the island about 10 miles west of Līhuʻe, said she’s been trying to add an additional building to run an infant-toddler center for seven or eight years, but on the island, the process is lengthy. Even if it does come together soon, which she expects it may, construction is projected to take six to 10 months. Adjusted for Kauaʻi time — everything takes longer here, she said — it’ll likely be closer to a year and a half.
Gibson first sought to add infant and toddler spots as a workforce retention tool for her own staff. But the addition didn’t come together in time; she lost one full-time teacher last year when his wife had a baby and he had to move into a part-time position elsewhere.
She’s seen families on both ends of the spectrum: those with the means to hire nannies to care for their younger children and those who had to move away to find care.
“Here, it’s very transient. It’s three to five years for a lot of people. The island spits you up or embraces you,” Gibson said.
Kauaʻi’s retention problem also extends to its teachers. If the island wants to continue to add more infant-toddler centers, it’s going to have to figure out how to recruit and train staff. Under Hawai’i regulations, infant and toddler teachers depending on their education level need one to two years of experience with that age group to qualify. How do you get experience on an island that has never really had spots to begin with?
Toni Fujimoto, the early childhood education program coordinator at Kauaʻi Community College, has been working on that side of the problem for years, including helping shape recommendations to the state to modernize the childcare licensing requirement. One of her goals is to set up apprenticeship programs for her students in partnership with the island’s centers. Some students can currently get experience at home-based centers or at centers like Gibson’s, which takes kids as young as 2 and technically counts as infant-toddler experience. But the options are severely limited.
And it’s already hard to recruit students to early childhood because the positions are among the lowest paid jobs in the country; some students just choose to work in tourism or other industries instead of pursuing the education needed to work in childcare. Last semester, Fujimoto had only four graduates from the associate’s degree program. She is now recruiting as early as middle school, sussing out any students who may have interest.
One of Fujimoto’s recent graduates, Alysha Palacio, grew up on Kauaʻi with her grandparents caring for her. But she did not have that option when she became pregnant her senior year in high school in 2021. Her fiance is a plumber and couldn’t bring their daughter with him to work. Her mother is a store manager who works from sun up to sundown with no days off. Her father is a waiter who often works double shifts. Her grandparents passed away. Already, Palacio’s sister-in-law had to leave the island because of lack of childcare.
Palacio chose to study early childhood education — hoping, at first, that it would also prepare her for being a mom — and kept her daughter with her while she did classes on Zoom or went to campus. It took her four years to complete her associate degree. She graduated in May hoping to go work at a preschool but is still waiting to hear back about a job.
Out in the community, she sees the struggle reflected in other moms. At a restaurant recently, she noticed her server’s young children sitting alone at a back table.
“Another waitress comes in and she has her kids, and she puts her kids on this back table, and it clicked in my head that they’re bringing their kids here because they have nobody else to watch them, so their kids are literally going to work with them,” she said. “When I see that in public I feel really bad.”
At Kauaʻi Montessori, director Marci Whitman has had to weigh whose pocketbook she would hurt more. She recently lost two teachers because they couldn’t afford housing on the island; another two nearly became homeless. But to pay them, she had to raise an already high tuition.
She chose the teachers, who are paid between $20 and $27 an hour.
Over the past several years, Kauaʻi’s efforts to add more infant spots have butted up against a growing affordability crisis that is among the most severe in the nation. As much as some parents may want to put their youngest in childcare, few can actually afford it.
Tuition for infant spots at Kaua’i Montessori is $2,400 a month. On an island where the median household income is about $83,000, that price would swallow about a third of it. So though Whitman may have 12 spots for infants, only three are taken due to the high cost.
Statewide, the average cost of full-time, center-based infant care in Hawai’i is $25,096 per year, according to an analysis by Child Care Aware. That’s second only to Massachusetts among the 47 states for which there is data.
Businesses on Kauaʻi are trying to fill gaps as they can. Tamara Lawrence, a mom of three young kids, opened a play space in 2023 to try to offer some respite for stay-at-home parents or those working from home with their kids. But the business struggled to make a profit — people said the play space was too expensive.
They recently moved into a new space on the main street in Līhuʻe and established a nonprofit arm that will help them take in some grant funding to lower costs. After their grand opening next month, they’ll start marketing the Play Hale’s drop-in childcare option: two hours a day for $25.
“My goal is to eventually make it very minimal payment or no payment at all — that’s what our community wants and needs,” Lawrence said.
The community also needs something really basic: childcare they can trust. Over and over again, the question of whether parents could trust childcare providers came up in more than a dozen conversations The 19th had with parents, providers and childcare experts on Kauaʻi. In a place where, for decades, people have relied on their family and each other for care, growing to trust more formal childcare options is a barrier in itself (for those who have the luxury of choice). Hawai’i also seriously lags other states in its reporting of incidents of serious injuries or abuse at childcare centers. Though the state is required by federal law to report such cases annually, regardless of whether there are any incidents at all, it hasn’t reported any data in a decade.
Lawrence said that, culturally, trust was a big issue, which is why she always advises her staff to create a connection with every patron that comes through their doors. Even remembering someone’s name can make someone more likely to return.
Nora Gregg, a stay-at-home mom of a teenage daughter and two boys under the age of 2 said the philosophy among most of the moms she knows on the island is that mom should be home with their baby. Some moms put their kids in nature pods, unlicensed childcare options where kids learn outside, or they gather together to share the caregiving. “That’s actually how women have mothered for many centuries — that’s the village,” she said.
“Parents here, they don’t just give your kids to strangers,” said Gregg, who has lived in Kaua’i for three years. “When I think back to how I put my daughter on the East Coast in daycare that I didn’t know the person, isn’t that weird?”
On Kauaʻi and elsewhere in the United States, a country that has now been in a childcare crisis for years, so much of the experience continues to be shaped by what little choice parents even have in the matter.
Connie, a single mom of a 4-month-old who has lived on Kauaʻi for five years, doesn’t trust anyone to care for her baby. So she brings her daughter along as she cleans Airbnb’s across the island. Cleaning is a lucrative job for women here; on any given year, 1.4 million tourists visit an island of 74,000 locals. She can’t afford to lose the job, which she needs to keep her health insurance. But Connie’s boss doesn’t know she brings her daughter to work. The 19th is only using her first name to protect her identity.
“I’d be lying if I said it was a walk in the park,” Connie said. “I could be just about done with the job, and she gets really really upset or fussy, and sometimes there’s nothing I can do to calm her down until we can get in the car and she falls asleep in her car seat. Or I could be just about done with my job, and my boss is like, ‘Oh, hey, can you go here? Can you go there? Can you do all these extra things?’”
She doesn’t feel like she has options. She can’t afford a nanny. But as her daughter gets older, she is going to have to seriously consider asking her family to move to the island with her to help, she said.
Until then, she sneaks her daughter’s bouncer and toys with her to work hoping her boss won’t find out.
“I have to take the risk every day.”
