It’s no secret that families across the country with infants and toddlers struggle to access licensed child care more than families with preschoolers - Child Care Resource and Referral (CCR&R) agencies have been shouting this from the rooftops for decades!

Over the past two years, Child Care Aware® of America has worked with CCR&Rs in five states to quantify the challenges families with infants face through our Mapping the Gap™ project. In our latest story map, Mapping the Gap™ in New York, we found many more examples of communities in which the supply for infant care does not meet the demands of families. For the estimated 425,000 infants and toddlers living across the state, there are only an estimated 127,000 slots, leaving an approximate supply and demand gap of 298,000 slots. This means that roughly 70% of infants and toddlers in New York might not have access to licensed child care in their communities.  

Did you know that there are approximately 12.5 million children in some sort of regular child care arrangement? Yet there are communities across the country where the supply of child care doesn’t meet the need for child care. Child Care Aware® of America helped states quantify families’ child care needs through our Mapping the Gap™ project, and learned a lot about child care gaps across the US:  

For decades, Child Care Resource and Referral (CCR&R) agencies have prioritized tracking child care supply and demand in order to better serve the children, families and child care providers in their area. With the reauthorization of the Child Care and Development Block Grant in 2014, states are now required to do this, and CCR&Rs are written into the law as experts in tracking child care supply and demand. For most state agencies or CCR&Rs, this means tracking the number of licensed child care spaces for children available at licensed child care providers. But, in recent times we’ve seen challenges with only being able to track the total number of children in a program, not the number of child care spaces by age group.

Child Care Aware® of America is excited to release four new story maps examining gaps in child care supply and demand  for infants and toddlers. Child care slots for children age birth to three can be both difficult to find and unaffordable for many  families. Our Child Care Resource & Referral (CCR&R) partners in Alaska, Arizona, Delaware and Hawaii wanted  to investigate the supply and demand for infant-toddler care in their states, in addition to mapping child care supply and demand for children under six with all parents in the labor force.  Our findings were quite shocking:

A recent report from Healthy Babies Bright Futures found that infant rice cereal has six times more arsenic than other types of infant cereal. That finding builds on the evidence from previous studies, including one from Consumer Reports.

On November 15, employees from Child Care Aware® of America, Good360, and Charles River Associates worked together to assemble disaster relief kits for Niño’s de Nueva Esperanza child care center in Sabana Seca, Puerto Rico. Volunteers assembled 150 kits that will be sent alongside thousands of other donations garnered by Good360 to families struggling to recover after Hurricane Maria. These kits included goods such as bug spray, coloring books, markers, crayons, socks, and facial wipes that were donated from Nike, Mattel, CVS Pharmacy and others. In addition to assembling kits, volunteers wrote letters to families receiving these kits wishing them a happy holiday season, and reminding them that we are thinking of them during their recovery efforts.