Ask any child care provider about the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic and you’re likely to hear a variation of one answer: “I can’t believe it’s been six years.”
On March 13, 2020, when former Gov. Chris Sununu declared a state of emergency in New Hampshire because of a new, rapidly spreading disease, early educators did not have the opportunity to wonder what it might mean for their industry. They were declared essential workers and began providing child care to hospital workers and other essential personnel only a week after the lockdown began.
Looking back, many people remember the pandemic as a period of anxiety, forced time at home, social distancing, and separation from loved ones. For New Hampshire’s child care providers, COVID-19 ushered in a period of pivotal change for the industry, for better and for worse.
Years later, the effects are still being felt. The pandemic exacerbated pre-existing issues in the industry, such as staffing and pay, while also drawing increased attention from lawmakers, businesses, and parents on the pivotal role of child care providers in their communities.
The early education workforce has been declining since the mid-2010s, when the state began cutting high school and college-level programs, narrowing the workforce pipeline. But when the pandemic hit, many licensed child care providers decided to retire or leave the industry altogether, creating more workforce strains.
According to the New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute, child care workers in 2023 earned a median hourly wage of $15.62, the lowest among all occupations in the state except for fast-food workers, while the state’s overall median wage was $24.03. Because of the high costs associated with operating a program, directors are often unable to raise salaries, even when they want to. As a result, maintaining staff is difficult.
Staff positions not refilled
As executive director of Keene Day Care Center for over two decades, Suelaine Pooling has seen staff come and go. However, during the pandemic, she lost 25% of her teachers to higher-paying jobs, and has been unable to have the center at full enrollment since.
“We went from a program that was a very stable, low turnover kind of program, and then COVID hit,” Pooling said. “They just got sort of burned out.”
State records show that there has been an 8.9% decrease in the number of licensed child care providers between 2020 and 2025.
Despite a long waitlist, the center, which is licensed to care for 90 children, has been able to care for only 70 to maintain legal staff-to-child ratios. The center nearly closed in 2023 due to staffing issues, but was able to readjust enrollment to keep the program open.
Usually, Pooling would take children off the waitlist when 5-year-olds age out of the program and go to kindergarten. Instead, she didn’t, reducing the program’s earnings to remain compliant.
“It was challenging. We’ve adjusted,” she said. “We always made sure that the kids we had were cared for. We were able to adjust so no one lost care.”
Roll-back of COVID support
Pooling has been trying to find a way to address this in her own center. Last December, the federal government awarded Keene Day Care Center a grant to fund new teacher positions without requiring it to enroll more children to cover the costs. The hope is that new teachers will be able to get classroom experience under less pressure and without the center needing to enroll more children to retain them.
Child care employers are also dealing with the ramifications of the rollback of COVID-era support.
Elizabeth Witmer and Kristie George run the largest child care program in New Hampshire and the largest single-site YMCA child care program in the country. They have been struggling to help their staff bounce back from what they were subjected to during the pandemic.
The Merrimack Y Early Education Center was closed for only about a week after Sununu’s state of emergency declaration. St. Joseph’s Hospital in Nashua, and later Southern New Hampshire Medical Center, asked whether the YMCA could provide child care for their medical workers, and Witmer and George were happy to oblige to keep their doors open.
Teachers who continued to work at the center were more supported than ever. Due to an influx of cash from the government and grants, George said that they were able to increase hourly wages by $5 and offer employees more benefits. As the executive and deputy directors, respectively, Witmer and George also did things to “boost morale,” like catered lunch on Fridays.
Work ethic changing
As COVID-era appropriations are being rolled back, the directors noticed their staff feel “entitled” because they were “given so much” during the time.
“They were so used to just being handed everything and it just changed the work ethic of a lot of people,” George said.
Like Pooling, Witmer and George also dealt with high staff turnover during the pandemic. Along with health-related uncertainty, they had trouble getting teachers to return to work because they could earn more through unemployment, while others left for better salaries in other fields.
“There just were a lot of jobs that were paying a lot more than child care that people went to instead of staying in the field,” George said.
It had “faded” over time as staff had turned over, but since people were so used to getting paid more, George and Witmer had to increase their pay scale “drastically.”
The pandemic changed the way infants and toddlers develop, socialize, and learn. Child care providers have noticed how the pandemic has impacted the development of young children, and these effects continue to play out in the classroom.
Worries were warranted
When the mask mandate was in place, Witmer and George were worried that infants and toddlers would be unable to see their mouths, as this is crucial for the development of speech skills. At the time, it seemed like a small hump in the larger scale of the pandemic, but years later, it is clear their worries were warranted.
They have noticed an uptick in the number of children at the center with sensory, speech, and language needs. However, Witmer said the most significant change is that children are having a harder time developing social-emotional skills.
“Social development is essential,” Witmer said. “It’s as important, if not more important, than being able to learn to speak and to do math and so forth. Because life is a lot harder, no matter how bright you are, if you can’t be resilient. If you can’t learn to cope, it impacts those things.”
In a 2025 National Institutes of Health study on the impact of COVID-19 disruptions to early childhood education, evidence showed that for children ages 0 to 5, the pandemic has resulted in poorer early language and literacy skills and increased social-emotional problems.
More help needed these days
The increase in development and behavioral issues in young children whose early moments were affected is showing up in different ways. George said children get overstimulated more easily, bite more, and have weaker coping skills when it comes to unwinding and de-escalating from a situation.
“It’s the intensity of social emotional skills and how pervasive that is on a child’s ability to learn and to be in a group of children is something we’re still trying to deal with,” Witmer said.
As a result, George and Witmer said families have become “needier.” As professionals, they are often the first to notice when a child needs extra help or support, and parents, many of whom became moms and dads for the first time during the pandemic, have relied on them even more.
“I don’t ever remember before COVID having as many meetings [with parents] as we do now,” Witmer said.