Parents are sounding the alarm: in Boston, it’s hard to find child care.

A new report – (Re)Building Boston’s Early Education and Care Sector: Supply, Affordability and Quality Needed – offers policy solutions.

“Boston should be the best place in the country to raise a family, with high-quality, supportive child care programs and facilities accessible to all our residents,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu writes in a letter in the report’s opening pages. “But too often parents and caregivers across Boston’s neighborhoods face immense challenges finding quality, affordable care.”

The report, released by the Boston Opportunity Agenda’s Birth to Eight Collaborative, provides the proof. An analysis of Boston data from 2017 and 2020-2022 found in part that:

• in 2022, 76 percent of children age 2 or younger did not have access to formal child care

• In the past five years, the city lost nearly 20 percent of its family child care providers

• in 2022, on average, an estimated 39 percent of children aged birth to 5 years old lacked access to formal early education and care. “The access gap varied across neighborhoods, ranging from 5 percent in Roxbury to 61 percent in Charlestown.”

• “In 2022, the city-level quality gap for 0–5-year-olds in Boston was 69 percent.” The report defines the quality gap as the difference between “the total number of identified ‘high-quality’ education and care seats… and the number of children birth to 5 years of age… in a given geographical location, assuming all of these families would desire formal care near their homes.”

Wu says the report’s data will guide the city as it works to become more family friendly.

To learn more, check out WGBH’s interview of Lee Pelton, the president and CEO of the Boston Foundation and chair of the Boston Opportunity Agenda, who previewed the report’s findings last week.

A key policy lesson the report points to is that, “the early care sector’s funding structure was inadequate well before the pandemic, leaving the sector to operate on shoestring budgets, slim margins, and little to no savings to weather a crisis.”

In addition, the report notes, child care isn’t just a Boston problem, it’s a national problem:

“New research exploring the economic impact of an inadequate supply of early education and care seats for infants and young children in the United States estimates that losses in earnings, productivity, and revenue across all sectors have more than doubled compared to pre-pandemic estimates.”

There is good news. As WBUR reports:

“ ‘A bright spot is that [Boston’s] universal pre-kindergarten program is really helping to lead the way in the expansion of early education and care and raising the quality,’ said Elizabeth Walczak, interim executive director of the Boston Opportunity Agenda.”

Taking more action can also help. The report makes five policy recommendations that can help Boston make progress. These recommendations are:

• increase and sustain public investment in early education and care

• sustain and expand universal pre-k (UPK) for 3- and 4-year-olds

• expand high-quality education and care for infants and toddlers

• have the city’s new Office of Early Childhood “define indicators and house data for tracking and improving” early education and care; and advance equity in data collection, access, and utilization, and

• coordinate with state-level advocates to help fund and sustain city-level efforts

The report concludes, “We hope that, bolstered by research that will continue to track trends, public and private shareholders will pursue efforts along these lines. The resulting improvements in our early education and care sector will not only help young people and families right now but will prepare us for a thriving future.”