Child Care vs. Day Care: What Are People Searching For?

In a recent post on our website by Emily Lian, she looked at the etymology of the word, “daycare.” Many Early Education advocates support using the term Child Care instead of Day Care because we do not care for “days” but for “children.” Obviously, Early Childhood Education is also a widely used term but for this post we will focus on the battle between the terms Day Care and Child Care. There are many metrics to use to figure out which term is more prevalent. In this case we will use Google Searches. Below is a graph using Google Trends that shows how often the terms Day Care and Child Care have been searched for the past 5 years. As you can see, while there is correlation between how often the terms are searched for, it looks like Child Care has a small but consistent lead which should make most advocates happy.

It is interesting to note, that across the country, there are a few pockets that search for day care more including in southern Florida, Southern Texas, parts of the Northeast, and Montana. which you can see on this chart.

Some what surprising, in Massachusetts , the terms are search for at a nearly equal rate as you can see below.