In recent years, the U.S. Department of War’s Child Development Program—the largest employer-sponsored child care system in the country—has struggled to meet the demand for child care because of challenges in recruiting and retaining a qualified workforce. To study this issue, RAND researchers assessed contributing factors to help improve the strategies used to recruit, train, develop, compensate, and retain qualified staff.

Assessment of Military Child Development Program Staffing

Initial Findings Regarding the Workforce

Lynn A. Karoly, Laura Werber, Laura Bellows, Jonah Kushner, Ashley Woo, Jonas Kempf

ResearchPublished Dec 4, 2025

The U.S. military has a long-standing commitment to investing in accessible, affordable, and high-quality child care services for its active component, reserve components, and civilian personnel. In support of this objective, the U.S. Department of War’s (DOW’s) Child Development Program (CDP) represents the largest employer-sponsored child care system in the country. However, in recent years, the CDP has struggled to meet the demand for child care, a trend that predates the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic and reflects the challenges of recruiting and retaining a qualified workforce.

In light of this issue, RAND researchers developed a project to collect information that will allow DOW to make informed decisions on ways to improve the existing strategies used to recruit, train, develop, compensate, and retain qualified staff within the CDP and to provide the information necessary for DOW leadership to make data-driven decisions regarding additional strategies, policy revisions, and future resource allocations to address the identified staffing challenges. This report from the project’s first phase focuses on four study components using a document review and orienting interviews; an analysis of military service personnel and their family demographics; an analysis of administrative data regarding CDP facilities, enrollment, and unmet needs; and an analysis of administrative data on CDP workforce qualifications, compensation, and retention.

Key Findings

  • As of 2022, active-duty members had 750,000 children under age 13, the age group eligible for care. Close to half of these children are under age 5.
  • In March 2020, the CDP met about 81 percent of child care demand. By December 2022, the CDP only met 74 percent of child care demand. This decrease in meeting needs occurred despite a relatively stable capacity and falling enrollment.
  • The pandemic reduced demand but did not reduce it enough to bring supply and demand back into alignment. The pandemic actually reduced the CDP’s effective capacity because of the drop in the workforce size, leaving centers with classrooms that they could not staff.
  • CDP staff are almost universally female and are predominantly military spouses (30 percent of direct care staff). The majority of the workforce identifies as nonwhite.
  • CDP direct care staff’s pay, benefits, and working conditions are not necessarily competitive with alternatives in the labor market—including for military spouses, who now have more remote work options.
  • Twenty percent of new entry cohorts leave their CDP jobs within three months. Fifty percent of new entrants leave after the first year. The high rates of attrition appear to be positively linked to staff members’ education levels, average wages in the local labor market, and employment in the period after the onset of the pandemic.

Recommendations

  • DOW should adopt strategies for having linkable CDP-related analytic data readily available across the services. Although the services might need data to understand their own CDP indicators and outcomes, DOW needs information that can be harmonized and combined across services or matched to external data to analyze the system as a whole.
  • DOW should adopt strategies for improving information on families and CDP workforce members. Although administrative data systems can be very useful for capturing various structural features of the CDP system and some key outcomes, such data are limited in the information that is available. Given the expected analytic value of data investments, RAND researchers recommend augmenting the Survey of Active Duty Spouses, as well as conducting surveys of DOW reserve components and the DOW civilian workforce, regarding their child care needs and conducting periodic cross-service surveys of the CDP workforce.

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Karoly, Lynn A., Laura Werber, Laura Bellows, Jonah Kushner, Ashley Woo, and Jonas Kempf, Assessment of Military Child Development Program Staffing: Initial Findings Regarding the Workforce. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2025. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2186-1.html.
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This research was sponsored by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and conducted within the Personnel, Readiness, and Health Program of the RAND National Security Research Division.

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