In rural communities, it’s common for families to have to cobble together child care. That could mean a parent working one half of the day while a spouse works the other half. It could mean a family sending the youngest child to a relative’s house until the oldest gets home from school. Transportation and the time it takes to get to a child care provider are often a burden for parents living in remote towns, Nelson said.

“Because you’re rural, people have to drive that much farther to get to you, and, in fact, their jobs,” Nelson said.

Advocates for in-home child care believe expanding and investing in programs like Nelson’s could be a solution, particularly for rural areas, where many families already use informal child care because of fewer centers.

“You can’t build a functional business model for a center in a very sparsely populated place, right? It’s too costly to transport kids there and you need to have enough demand to justify building a center,” said Natalie Renew, director of Home Grown, an organization that raises money and advocates for in-home centers. “So, often in rural communities, you’ll find a network of home-based child care providers, because that’s just a more feasible business model and meets the needs of families in those communities.”

The Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, estimates there are about 111,000 fewer child care jobs in December of 2021 than there were when the pandemic started in 2020. One study done by researchers at Columbia University estimates that nearly three-quarters of child care centers closed because of Covid-19 in April 2020, and about one-third remained closed a year later.

In rural areas, where families often have different needs and fewer options than larger cities, in-home child care providers can be a more flexible choice.

But there are also challenges to increasing the number of in-home child care programs and improving their quality. It is more complicated for states to regulate child care programs in homes versus centers, and the rules vary across the country.

Read the full article about childcare for rural families by Ariel Gilreath at The Hechinger Report.