The call came on a Tuesday morning in late January 2026. Janine Nakamura had just dropped off her seven-year-old son Marcus at his therapy session in Fresno when she pulled over to answer — not because she had good news to share, but because she finally had time to talk. She’d responded to a call-for-sources I’d posted on social media a few weeks earlier, asking to hear from small business owners who were trying to navigate government benefits programs. She wrote back in three sentences: “I own a daycare. I have a kid with special needs. I have no idea what I’m doing with any of this.”
When I sat down with Janine Nakamura at a coffee shop near her center on a Wednesday afternoon in February, she brought a manila folder stuffed with tax documents, billing statements from a regional therapy provider, and two years’ worth of IRS correspondence she described as “completely incomprehensible.” She is 39, precise and quick-talking, the kind of person who quotes spreadsheets from memory. And yet, as she laid the papers out on the table, she looked genuinely exhausted.
“I have a graduate degree,” she told me, half-laughing. “I run a licensed business. I have twelve employees. And I have been leaving money on the table for two years because I didn’t know the right questions to ask.”
A Business She Built, and the Debt That Followed Her In
Janine opened Little Roots Learning Center in Fresno in 2018, two years after completing a Master’s degree in Early Childhood Education at California State University, Fresno. The graduate program cost her roughly $71,000 in federal loans — a figure she recited to me without hesitation, the way people quote numbers they’ve stared at for too long. She told me she’d taken out the loans believing the credential would let her run a more competitive, grant-eligible center. “And it did,” she said. “At first.”
By 2022, the center was generating approximately $184,000 in annual gross revenue. She had fourteen enrolled families, a waiting list, and two full-time staff members in addition to part-time aides. Then 2023 happened. Enrollment dropped as several dual-income families in her area lost jobs or relocated. Revenue fell to roughly $141,000. By 2025, it had slipped further — to approximately $126,000 — while her fixed costs held steady or grew.
Meanwhile, her son Marcus — diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at age four — required therapies that her family’s insurance only partially covered. Janine told me they were spending approximately $2,400 per month out of pocket on applied behavior analysis therapy and speech services. “That’s not a complaint,” she said quickly. “Marcus needs it. It works. But $2,400 a month on top of everything else — it adds up in ways that don’t forgive you.”
Her husband, who works as a logistics coordinator, contributes to the household income, but Janine described their financial picture as “always running slightly behind.” They had roughly $9,000 in a joint savings account, no dedicated retirement fund beyond a small IRA she’d contributed to sporadically, and mounting credit card balances she used to bridge slow months at the center.
The Benefits She Had No Idea She Qualified For
The turning point, Janine told me, came from an unexpected place: a Facebook comment. After she’d responded to my social media post, another person in the thread — a tax preparer from Modesto — mentioned in passing that many small daycare owners fail to claim the full Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit for a qualifying child with a disability. Janine said she’d assumed, incorrectly, that the credit was only for families paying for someone else’s childcare. She didn’t realize it applied differently when the dependent had a documented disability and required ongoing care.
According to the IRS, the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit allows eligible taxpayers to claim a percentage of qualifying care expenses — up to $3,000 for one qualifying person or $6,000 for two or more. For taxpayers with a qualifying child who is permanently and totally disabled, the age limit does not apply. Janine had not claimed this credit in either 2023 or 2024.
She also hadn’t enrolled Marcus in California’s Regional Center system, which provides services and funding coordination for individuals with developmental disabilities in California. A friend had mentioned it years ago, but Janine told me she’d assumed the waitlists were too long and the paperwork too complicated. “I just kept putting it off,” she said. “Which I now understand was costing me real money.”
The Reckoning: What Two Amended Returns Revealed
After our initial conversation, Janine told me she hired a new tax preparer — someone with specific experience in small business returns and disability-related credits. The process took about six weeks. What that preparer found, she said, was both a relief and a source of deep frustration.
For tax year 2023, Janine had under-claimed her dependent care expenses and missed a partial business use deduction related to a room at the center she had converted into a quiet sensory space — partly for enrolled children with developmental needs, and partly because Marcus attended the center on two afternoons a week. That alone was worth roughly $1,800 in additional deductions. Combined with the properly filed dependent care credit, her 2023 amended return generated a refund of approximately $4,700.
For tax year 2024, the numbers were larger. The preparer also identified that Janine had not taken the full Section 179 deduction for equipment she’d purchased for the center — a $6,200 sensory activity kit and two specialized nap mats — in the prior year. The 2024 amended return, still being processed as of February 2026, was expected to yield a refund of between $7,000 and $9,500, depending on final IRS review.
“The hardest part,” Janine told me, “was sitting there with the preparer and realizing how much time had passed. Two years. I’d filed my taxes both years thinking I was doing everything right. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, exactly. I just didn’t know what I didn’t know.”
What Changed, and What Still Weighs on Her
When I followed up with Janine in late March 2026, she had received her 2023 refund — $4,740, which she immediately directed toward her highest-interest credit card balance. Marcus’s Regional Center intake assessment had been scheduled for April. She described herself as cautiously optimistic, though she was careful not to frame any of this as a clean resolution.
Her student loans remained a central concern. Janine told me she had been on an income-driven repayment plan through Federal Student Aid but hadn’t recertified her income since 2022 — which meant her monthly payments were calculated based on a higher income year. She had recently submitted a recertification request and expected her payments to drop, though she didn’t know by how much yet.
She also shared a worry she returned to several times during our conversations: retirement. She is 39. Her IRA balance, she told me, sits at approximately $14,000 — “not nothing, but nothing close to enough.” The daycare’s declining revenue has made consistent contributions difficult, and she said she’d completely stopped contributions in 2024 to keep the business liquid.
What strikes me most about Janine’s situation is how ordinary it is. She is not reckless. She is not uninformed in any general sense. She holds a graduate degree in a field directly related to the programs she was failing to access. And still, she spent two years filing taxes that left thousands of dollars unclaimed — not because she made errors, but because no one in her professional network, no government communication, and no automated system flagged the gap.
“I think about all the other daycare owners I know,” she told me as we wrapped up our last conversation. “Most of them don’t have a graduate degree. Most of them are not sitting here with a folder of tax documents trying to figure it out. If I missed this stuff, they definitely did too.”
She paused, then added: “That bothers me more than my own situation, honestly.”
As I drove home from Fresno that afternoon, I kept thinking about that folder of papers she’d brought to the table — two years of correspondence, neatly organized and largely misunderstood. The benefits were there. The eligibility was there. What was missing was someone to connect the two. That gap, for Janine and for many like her, is not small. It costs real money, in real years, that don’t come back.
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