Sometimes, it’s easier to start with baby steps.

This is perhaps true, appropriately, in the case of the ongoing child care crisis in Nebraska, a large and seemingly insurmountable problem that leaves families in a lurch — especially those below the poverty line or those living in rural child care deserts — both in terms of access and cost.

While big problems often require big solutions, sometimes an accumulation of smaller steps can have the same effect — an approach organizations in Lincoln and across the state are rightly taking in an attempt to chip away at this mounting crisis.

Efforts like creating free child care classes with scholarship opportunities for potential candidates and examining time-consuming or costly bureaucratic hurdles — such as fingerprinting checks that are creating logjams for potential workers — are a good starting point, but more needs to be done, both by state and local leaders and policymakers.

The need, and the urgency, to support these efforts is obvious: Rural parts of the state are grappling with a lack of access to child care, candidates everywhere are hard to find, and a windfall of federal pandemic dollars that gave a boost to the child care industry expired in September.

In Lincoln, 78% of children under the age of 6 have all parents in the workforce, and more than 3,600 children under 5 years old live in families that fall below the poverty threshold, according to data from the nonprofit Lincoln Littles.

“We have public school systems for K-12, but when people are at the lowest point, probably, in their earning power, they have young children, and yet they’re expected to pay nearly college tuition prices for child care,” Anne Brandt, executive director of Lincoln Littles, told the Journal Star’s Jenna Ebbers.

The small-step approach can and should be embraced by all. The Legislature, for one, can continue to examine hurdles like fingerprinting and background checks, which the Health and Human Services Committee met last week to discuss.

Providers, too, can follow in the footsteps of places like Lincoln Littles, which is able to help some families with the cost of tuition and created a survey for employers to help learn how many of their employees have children under the age of 5 who may need child care and what barriers they face.

Providers also need support and raising subsidy reimbursement rates to reflect the true cost of care should also be examined, as Brandt pointed out.

These actions — while certainly not the only things that can be done — aren’t big, giant leaps. Sometimes it’s simply the smaller steps that can ultimately put us in the right direction.

This editorial first appeared in the Lincoln Journal-Star on October 18, 2023. It was distributed by The Associated Press.