“You don’t have to be in poverty to need assistance to pay for child care”: Perspectives from middle-income New Mexico families receiving subsidized care

• NM expanded child care subsidy eligibility up to 400% of the federal poverty level. • Participating middle-income families reported gains in stability and well-being. • Participants reported gains in their children’s cognitive and social development. • Most burdens occurred from learning about eligibility or securing appropriate care. • Program benefits outweighed costs for middle-income, newly eligible participants. New Mexico has adopted some of the nation’s most expansive eligibility criteria for subsidized child care, creating novel opportunities to study the consequences of subsidy receipt for middle-income families. This study combines bounded rationality and the administrative burden framework, exploring middle-income families’ perceptions of whether and in what ways subsidized child care is sufficiently beneficial to outweigh the costs and burdens of participating in a means-tested government program. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 33 newly eligible subsidy recipients, who described benefits from subsidy receipt that included enhancements to their economic stability, employment, emotional well-being, and their children’s social and cognitive development. Parents also highlighted additional gains, including opportunities to pursue education, select higher quality care settings that would otherwise be unaffordable, and access support for their children’s language development. Parents described relatively few compliance burdens from program participation, and most often experienced burdens related to learning about program eligibility and processes, worrying about policy sustainability, and finding and enrolling in available care that met their needs. Some parents noted limits to the subsidy’s benefits, citing concerns about teacher turnover, inconsistent quality of care, and practices that did not fully align with their parenting preferences.