COVID-19 made child care deserts even worse in 2021, leaving working parents to scramble Elinor Aspegren, USA TODAY
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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.
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.
This story is part of an EdSurge Research series about early childhood education.
One of the hallmarks of President Bidenâs $1.8 trillion American Families Plan is its ambitious proposal to create something tantamount to universal preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds. The plan calls for a national partnership with states that, when fully implemented, could put five million children into high-quality programs and save the average American family $13,000 per year.
The proposal has a long way to go before becoming a reality. And with the Senate split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, there is a chance the program may not materialize at all. But even the prospect of universal preschool, long embraced by other developed nations, is ginning up a great deal of attention and interest from the public, especially after a hard year that has revealed to many families just how critical early care and education is to a healthy, functioning U.S. workforce, not to mention its importance