Finding good child care challenged many Americans even before COVID-19.
Things got tougher during the pandemic, when many day care centers closed, leaving parents to juggle working from home with seeing to their children’s needs.
But any sense of relief that might come from more schools reopening and parents returning full-time to work is being offset by a new dilemma: the growing prevalence of child care deserts.
Just over half of Americans lived in areas with insufficient child care before the coronavirus, according to a 2018 report from the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C.-based public policy research organization. A survey by the group warned the number could soon be higher; nearly two-thirds of child care providers said in March 2020 that they could not survive a closure that extended longer than a month.