Mapping Access to Child Care for Minnesota Families

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Many Minnesota families with young children struggle to access, afford, and provide early care and education opportunities that can help them both earn a living and help their children thrive. 

The quality of children’s experiences in the first few years of life has lifelong consequences for the children, their families, neighbors, and communities.

Community leaders want to promote families’ access to child care with smart investments that focus resources on the places and opportunities that will make the most difference.

The tools on this site reveal how families’ access to care varies around the state and around each neighborhood. It gives you the richest, most-accurate view available of the childcare system by harnessing together data on the locations, prices, and quality ratings of all licensed center-based and home-based care providers including public pre-kindergartens and Head Start; U.S. Census data on where Minnesota families with young children tend to live; and data on travel time by car between residential communities and provider locations. It grows out of research by economists at the University of Minnesota.

This is the view of the map where you can find out three different dimensions of childcare access (quantity, cost, quality) in your community (on the top left box).

On this map, you can see roughly where families with young children tend to live. Dots on the map are distributed approximately where such families live with about 4 families represented by each dot. Actual family locations are not shown, only simulated locations. But dots are densely packed in areas where many families with young children live and sparse in areas where few live.

Each dot’s color expresses if families in that location have better access to child care slots (darker blue) or worse access (darker red). Families prefer having more slots at nearer by providers and fewer other families competing for those slots. This focus on quantity of nearby care is one aspect of better access.

The cost of care is another important aspect of families’ access to care. Cost has two main components: the price the provider charges and the value of the travel time ($10/hour) required to access the provider (10 drives weekly). Families living closer to providers charging lower prices have lower total costs of access.

The analysis does not take into account public subsidies to attend private care, such as Minnesota’s Early Learning Scholarship program. We are working to obtain the relevant data to incorporate this.

The third and final aspect of access to care focuses on the quality of care. For each simulated family location, we measure the share of nearby slots that are highly-rated in Minnesota’s Parent Aware system.

You can also get a community-level access report based on 2022 data. Report 1) compares family access across communities around the state. 2) shows a trend over time.