Parents sign up for daycare waitlists before conception, still wait 2+ years

In Denver, Seattle, and other high-demand metro areas, daycare waitlists stretch 18 months to 3 years. Parents in Colorado report signing up for waitlists before they are even pregnant. A 2022 Child Care Aware survey found over half of parents are on waitlists, sometimes waiting a year or longer. So what? A parent who gets pregnant today and immediately joins every waitlist in their area may still not have a childcare slot when their 12-week parental leave ends. The gap between 'leave ends' and 'slot opens' can be 6-18 months. So what? Families must find and pay for expensive stopgap solutions -- a temporary nanny at $20-30/hour, an unlicensed home provider found through word of mouth, or one parent quitting their job entirely. So what? The families who can least afford these stopgaps (lower-income, single-parent households) are the ones most harmed, because they don't have savings to bridge the gap or a second income to fall back on. So what? By the time a slot finally opens, many families have already made permanent career sacrifices -- one parent has left the workforce, taken a demotion, or switched to part-time. The childcare slot arrives too late to undo the damage. The problem persists because there is no mechanism to signal demand to suppliers in advance. Childcare centers have no incentive to expand capacity based on waitlist length because expansion requires capital investment, hiring (in a labor market where workers are scarce), and navigating licensing/zoning -- all before seeing a single dollar of revenue. The waitlist itself costs nothing to maintain, so it grows indefinitely.