Hollywood slump, UCLA closures fuel L.A. child-care crisis; parents face $4,000 alternatives
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- Hollywood’s downturn and UCLA’s planned closure of two early-childhood centers are shrinking an already strained Los Angeles child-care market.
- More than 450 spots concentrated on the Westside have been lost, forcing parents to seek out limited licensed spots.
- Families face steep costs and few alternatives: Infant care can top $4,000 a month, while Los Angeles County has licensed capacity for just 4% of children younger than 2.
Jillian Griffith had just gotten her 21-month-old to sleep and was sitting down for a story with her 4-year-old when she glanced at her phone and saw an urgent email from preschool. An enormous problem had just landed in her lap.
In November, the 35-year-old Samuel Goldywn Foundation Children’s Center would close, the email said. Its operators blamed Hollywood’s downturn and the flight of 4-year-olds to California’s free transitional kindergarten programs.
Griffith’s household budget had already felt the sting of the industry’s troubles as her husband, a TV writer, weathered the strike. Now they would also have to find a new preschool in a shrinking and exorbitantly priced market.
“It felt like a whiplash of news,” said Griffith, a museum professional, who estimated most of her salary goes to child care. At “Sam G,” as parents call it, that’s $3,233 per month for children under 2.
The closure exposes how working parents in Los Angeles face increasingly fragile lifelines to stable child care essential to family life. Parents — many of whom do not qualify for state subsidies — are financially hammered, paying thousands of dollars a month for child care as the centers they desperately need struggle to stay afloat and the institutions that support them pull back.
“Your whole life becomes consumed with ... how do we find child care?” Griffith said.
Engage with our community-funded journalism as we delve into child care, transitional kindergarten, health and other issues affecting children from birth through age 5.
Retreats from early-childhood care
The Goldwyn closure comes as another major Los Angeles institution retreats from providing care. UCLA recently announced that it will shut its two early childhood centers in June, saying the university needs to concentrate resources on its higher education goals and serving the children of its staff and students was not sustainable. The university is also ending its lease with University Preschool Nursery School on its campus.
The pending closure of the four Westside child-care centers eliminates more than 450 licensed spots for young children, according to California records. More than 100 of those were designated for infants, slots that are especially hard to find.
Overall, Los Angeles County has enough licensed capacity to serve just 4% of children younger than 2, according to a county assessment. From 2014 to 2024, Los Angeles lost more than 12,000 spaces for 3- and 4-year-olds, according to a report from UC Berkeley. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the closures — nearly 500 licensed child-care providers in L.A. disappeared between 2021 and 2023.
Child care is also getting more expensive. The average cost of full-time child care in Los Angeles County is about 17% of the median household income, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
Krystal Kendall, a manager at UCLA whose 1-year-old daughter goes to the UCLA center, recently toured one of the few nearby schools that takes babies.
UCLA will close its remaining child-care centers in June, leaving hundreds of families scrambling to find new care amid an acute countywide shortage.
“There were probably 30 other UCLA parents there with me, and we’re all fighting for a spot,” Kendall said.
She pays $3,300 per month at UCLA — which is “absurd,” she acknowledged. But a nearby Bright Horizons is $4,000 per month for a 1-year-old.
“We don’t quite know what we’re going to do,” Kendall said.
‘The first thing that goes’
High-quality child care is frequently touted as an imperative by politicians and institutions, said Anna Markowitz, an assistant professor of education at UCLA. But when money gets tight, “it’s the first thing that goes.”
“It’s a failed economic market,” said Donna Sneeringer, president of the Child Care Resource Center. “The cost of providing the service outstrips what the consumer can afford, and without some sort of public intervention, it just doesn’t math out.”
California’s major investment in free transitional kindergarten for 4-year-olds has helped families of 213,313 children this school year. But the rollout also upended the financial ledgers of day-care centers. Older children have long helped keep centers afloat. A class of 16 4-year-olds requires two teachers in California’s state-funded centers. The same number of infants require six teachers.
L.A. County’s local preschools are closing in areas where transitional kindergarten is thriving, disrupting an already fraught child-care system.
California offers child-care subsidies to lower-income families, but even then, the assistance reaches a fraction of those who qualify. Families earning more than roughly $116,000 a year for a household of four generally don’t qualify for those subsidies, leaving middle-income families to shoulder the full cost of child care, even as monthly tuition rivals a mortgage payment.
Child-care nonprofits are taking advantage of declining enrollment at TK-12 schools to turn vacant classrooms and even closed campuses into child-care hubs, expanding scarce infant and toddler slots.
The closure of early childhood care at UCLA hit hard. Professors who study sociology, pediatric medicine and the economics of family systems have pleaded with the university to keep it open, supplying data, charts and comparisons to other universities.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass urged UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk to reconsider the closures, warning in an Oct. 21 letter that it would eliminate an “invaluable resource that cannot be replicated elsewhere and will negatively impact UCLA and the broader Los Angeles.”
Assemblymember Sade Elhawary (D-Los Angeles) also urged Frenk to halt the closures and look for alternative solutions in an Oct. 19 letter that said 80 educators and 300 families would be affected.
According to UCLA, the centers have accumulated a deficit of $7.5 million. They indicated to parents the decision is final.
“Here we have another public institution that says it has a mission, that many things are mission-critical, but child care isn’t one of them,” Markowitz said. “We’re going to see UCLA do what America keeps doing: say we care about children, but not enough to pay for their care.”
Federal efforts to make child care more affordable have repeatedly stalled, leaving families to cover the cost.
‘Dark signal of the times and this town’
For more than three decades, the Goldwyn center, established by one of Hollywood’s most prominent filmmaking families, cared for the children of entertainment-industry workers, offering hours built around irregular schedules in partnership with the Motion Picture and Television Fund. It was licensed to care for more than 100 children, and before the pandemic, it did, according to a representative.
In recent months, 49 children were enrolled, according to Bright Horizons, a for-profit child-care chain contracted to operate the center.
A letter from Bright Horizons and Bob Beitcher, the chief executive of the Motion Picture and Television Fund, called out “the entertainment industry contraction” as a reason for the closure.
“That’s the thing that hit me the hardest,” said Lindsay Flinn, a senior production executive and mother of two. “This is such a dark signal of the times and this town.”
Beitcher said the cost of operating the center became too expensive. The corporate subsidies were over $300,000 in 2026, according to a statement.
“In a world where other industry members and families are struggling with the basics of remaining housed, maintaining the vehicles they need to do their work, supporting caregivers for other family members, this isn’t an acceptable use of our limited financial assistance resources,” Beitcher said.
The Motion Picture and Television Fund had revenue of just over $74 million in 2024, according to recent tax filings available for the nonprofit.
“When they said that $300,000, I was like, ‘Really, guys?’ That’s like a rounding error in most studios’ budget,” said Roei Eisenberg, a nonprofit consultant whose wife works in marketing for studios.
In the Blue Room at “Sam G,” Eisenberg’s 2-year-old is thriving.
“When I ask him who he loves ... his friends come first,” Eisenberg said. “It’s gonna be heartbreaking on his last day.”
Parents were directed to a Bright Horizons a few miles away, where tuition would eventually rise to $4,000 a month.
UCLA parents were offered a session with a child-care “navigator.” Parents said the conversations mostly served as a hand-patting session rather than practical help.
For children, the loss is harder to measure.
When a teacher was out recently, Kendall’s daughter wanted “nothing to do” with the unfamiliar teacher who took her place.
“This is going to be so hard, not just for us to find something, but for her to transition,” Kendall said.
Griffith recalls marveling at how many people knew her daughter’s quirks and what made her special soon after she started.
“I always just thought that was reserved for people who had the privilege of a nanny,” Griffith said. “I never really realized the possibility of what a day-care facility could mean to me and my child.”
This article is part of The Times’ early childhood education initiative, focusing on the learning and development of California children, from birth to age 5. For more information about the initiative and its philanthropic funders, go to latimes.com/earlyed.
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