Americans need help with child care. One solution is catching on in Maine.
From the outside, the light peeking through a window of the modest one-story home provides the only clue the day has begun at Kingfield Kinder Care.
Inside, Jackie Lobdell dotes on the children already in her care. She serves bite-size grapes and cinnamon bread to two diaper-clad little ones, checks on an older girl reading a book, and keeps an eye on her lively 3-year-old, Emilia, whose energy defies the time on the clock. It’s 6:45 a.m.
The first parent dropped her daughter off at 5:30 a.m. The early start helps fill a need Ms. Lobdell says she witnessed firsthand after she and her husband started fostering “Em,” whom they plan to adopt. Back then, she worked at the Poland Spring bottling plant in this central Maine town that otherwise relies on the logging, recreation, and tourism industries.
She and her husband cobbled together a patchwork quilt of child care.
“That didn’t work for my work schedule,” she says. “We were missing a lot of time.”
The experience fueled a longstanding desire to open her own child care center. But the question often holding Ms. Lobdell and other aspiring
