What’s a Child Care Desert? And Why It Should Matter if You’re Living in One

Sitting in a grad school class one evening at the start of a new semester, my friend Bianca — herself a single mother — and I noticed one of our classmates at the other end of our row had brought all three of her children to class with her that night. Apparently our classmate either hadn’t been able to — or couldn’t afford to — make other plans, so there they all were, one adult studying for her master’s degree, plus three boys of varying ages from toddler through school-age playing quietly and unobtrusively nearby. An impressive feat, maybe, but not exactly a sustainable one — for the mother, for her children, even for the teacher and the rest of the class, if it were to happen on a regular basis.

But such is the dilemma of finding accessible and affordable child care for many parents across America — including and especially low-income, single parents and millennials, three groups that the nonprofit advocacy group, Child Care Aware of America, identified in its 2017 State Fact Sheets as being those most in need. In fact, Child Care Aware of America has taken to calling these areas of limited access to quality child care “Child Care Deserts” — modeling the terminology after the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s concept of “Food Deserts.”