17 Years Searching for Quality Child Care, and Still More to Go! - By Anonymous

Our greatest challenge was when our first daughter was born in 2008, and my *now husband* and I were 19 years old. We were both attending college full-time and working part-time. Thankfully, we had family to help us with child care through that time. Following college, we began working full-time, and family could no longer support the daily needs of our three-year-old. We found local in-home providers, some licensed, some not, but year-to-year, it seemed to change. This home provider needed to return to the workforce for more income, that one was changing career paths, this one didn't have an opening for our new baby, that one was ready to retire. You get the drift.  

That same daughter is now 17 years old, and we have had three other children since then. There were many instances through the years when our school-aged younger children would go with the older siblings and sit in the gym or play outside on the fields waiting for one of us parents to get home from work because we didn't have child care. We have also had instances where one child was at a home-based child care center in one part of the county, and another one was at a different home-based child care center simply because there weren't openings for both of them in the same place or any others. Our youngest is now four years old and stays home with a grandparent following her half-day public preschool program each day.

There isn't a single child care center in our entire county. In fact, there also isn't a single stoplight in the county either; it is very rural. We travel 20 miles to the closest retail store, grocery store, pediatrician, and most of our jobs. Many children leave the county each day with their parents who are going to work. That, in turn, is causing the child care centers in surrounding counties to be over capacity.  

However, the need goes beyond child care. There are not any resources or options available to children under the age of 5. The local library started having a story time recently for children who don't attend preschool, and they started a move and groove hour immediately following preschool hours. Other than that, there are no additional supports or activities geared toward children in this age range.