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.”

(Food deserts are those barren places, often in low-income neighborhoods and in stretches of rural America, where no options exist for fresh, healthy food anywhere for miles around. Of course, there’s also similarity and overlap in where these two types of ‘deserts’ are located — frequently in areas of high poverty.)

Maybe the “childcare desert” terminology won’t take off — but it’s certainly one good way of illustrating how devoid of resources a particular area might be, and how far afield one has to go to have access to services.

Regarding the spectrum of child care resources by state, here’s what it looks like on a national basis…