This page is why Momni exists. Not a market opportunity — a wound in the world, documented below from this morning back to the year it first had a name. Read it both ways: down into the despair, and back up into the hope.
In 53 of the world's poorest countries, one in five children under five is left home alone — or with a sibling barely older — while their mothers work, because there is no other choice. In the richest country on Earth, care for two children now costs more than rent in 49 states. The crisis is not coming. It has been here for eighty years, wearing different clothes.
"Who will care for all of these children?"
And yet — in every decade of this timeline, the same answer keeps surfacing: mothers, organizing care for each other, faster than any institution. The despair is real. So is the hope. Hold both. I keep a running record of both in Crisis Watch, my weekly notes from the front — and if you're ready to be part of the answer, join the Circle.
$200 million approved; about 14,000 of ~35,000 waitlisted children receive vouchers. More than 21,000 still wait.
Source: WFYI · Indiana Capital ChronicleRecord demand forces the state to ration assistance; more than 11,000 families applied this year, and the list grew 60% in a single week.
Source: Missouri DESE · KCURAfter the pandemic chrysalis, Momni returns: community-led, founder-run, no investors, no take-rate. Mothers linking together, hour for hour — because the question of 2017 still hasn't been answered by anyone else.
The state halts new vouchers until 2027 as post-pandemic funding runs dry.
Source: WFYIThe US national average price reaches $13,184 per child per year — $28,168 for two children, roughly 35% of a median family's income. Prices rose 23% in four years.
Source: Child Care Aware of America · Axios$24 billion in pandemic stabilization funds — which had kept 220,000 childcare programs alive — expire. States begin reinstating waitlists; the 2026 surges are the aftershock.
Source: CBS News · The Century Foundation$180M+ pledged to expand affordable childcare across low- and middle-income countries, matching country investments dollar for dollar — the largest global push yet.
Source: World BankThe World Bank quantifies the crisis: more than 40% of all children below primary-school age need care and have no access to it. Closing the gap could create 43 million jobs — most of them for women.
Source: World BankRoughly 16,000 US childcare providers close permanently; about one million women go missing from the American workforce. Momni — like the providers it served — goes quiet. The chrysalis begins.
Source: Fortune / CCAoA · CAP51% of Americans live where licensed care is scarce or absent — including more than 75% of neighborhoods in Utah, where Momni was born.
Source: Center for American ProgressOn March 16, 2017, Karmel learns of the global childcare crisis and sees the answer in the elephant matriarchy: when one is vulnerable, the mothers circle up. Momni launches mom-to-mom caresharing from Provo, Utah, and grows to 26,000+ mamas in all 50 states.
Source: Utah Governor's Office of Economic Opportunity · Deseret News
The Overseas Development Institute publishes Women's Work: Mothers, Children and the Global Childcare Crisis — documenting 35.5 million children under five left home alone or with a young sibling across 53 developing countries, and mothers forced into "stark choices" between feeding their children and watching them. The term enters the world one year before Momni does.
Source: ODI, 2016Economists project nearly a billion women entering the global workforce within two decades — a tidal wave of working mothers the world's care systems were never built for. The need becomes mathematically undeniable.
Source: strategy+business$5-a-day universal childcare launches. Within two decades, labor participation among Quebec mothers of young children jumps ~20 points — rivaling Sweden — while the program pays for itself in tax revenue.
Source: IPPRILO Convention No. 156 calls on countries to build community childcare for workers with family responsibilities. Forty-five nations ratify it. Implementation lags by decades.
Source: ILOThe bipartisan Comprehensive Child Development Act passes Congress — national, universal, sliding-scale childcare. President Nixon vetoes it, citing its "family-weakening implications." American childcare policy never recovers; by then, newspapers were already calling it the "day care crisis."
Source: NPR · TIMEThe Lanham Act funds care for some 550,000–600,000 children of war-working mothers — proof, never repeated, that the country could do it when it decided children mattered to the war effort. The centers close in 1946.
Source: National Park ServiceAs mothers pour into war factories, stories of children locked in cars and empty homes shock the American public. The condition that would one day be called the global childcare crisis gets its first headlines — and its first proof that mothers will work regardless, so the only question is who holds the babies.
Source: History.com"Nearly 350 million children lack quality childcare in the world"
— World Bank, 2021"Millions of young children left home alone in global childcare crisis"
— Overseas Development Institute, 2016"America was very close to universal day care"
— The New RepublicEighty years of this timeline teaches one thing: governments wax and wane, funding cliffs come and go — and in every era, the care that actually happened came from mothers organizing for each other. That is what Momni is: the oldest answer in the world, finally with the tools it deserves. Mother to mother. Hour for hour.
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