The Challenges of Child Care

Disadvantaged Families | Description | Needs of Low- Income Families | Expenses | Federal Programs | Before- and After-School Programs | Interactions | Expanding Options

Affordable and accessible child care is a key factor in allowing many parents to obtain jobs. The quality of the care children receive can also have strong implications for their development. Mathematica Policy Research has been a leader in research about child care availability, quality, and cost.

Child Care for Disadvantaged Families

Practitioners and policymakers alike need good information about child care, although little is currently available. To provide these resources, we have described the child care services offered in large cities in our nation. Our staff wrote papers illustrating good policies and practices in these settings, focusing on how (1) child care programs can promote employment for low-income mothers whose children are in care, (2) parents can be informed about child care availability, and (3) child care quality can be improved. We also reviewed the research literature on the relationship between child care quality and children’s development and outlined a way to determine the cost of elevating child care center classrooms from merely meeting licensing standards to achieving professional standards for quality. The study included developing guides for practitioners to use in improving quality in centers and family child care homes, as well as training materials for low-income family child care providers.

Describing Child Care Across the Nation

To support the growing importance of child care in the policy environment, we conducted the well-known Profile of Child Care Settings study to describe the characteristics of child care providers, examine trends in the extent and nature of the child care supply, assess quality of care, and analyze child care costs, using a large nationally representative sample. We also looked at the relationship between the characteristics of child care settings and the characteristics of the neighborhoods in which they are located.

Meeting the Child Care Needs of Low-Income Families

Do low-income families have adequate choices in child care providers? Our research, which involved studying the availability of care in the neighborhoods where families live, suggests that most low-income parents are not able to consider center-based care unless they have access to adequate subsidies. Furthermore, low-income families in our nations’ poorest neighborhoods have the fewest options for certain kinds of center care. Their major barrier is cost, not availability, of care.

Child Care Expenses

Affordable child care is an important issue for working families. We have estimated child care expenses for low-income working mothers and illustrated how costs vary by hours of work, number and ages of children, and type of child care used, working with data from the National Child Care Survey (1990). We have also analyzed how subsidies and fees change with hours of work per day and days of work per week, through a survey of state child care policy directors about child care assistance programs.

Describing Federal Programs Administered by States

To provide a baseline picture before welfare reform, we studied AFDC Child Care, Transitional Child Care, At-Risk Child Care, and the Child Care and Development Block Grant program rules. Across states, we compared income eligibility limits, sliding fees for child care, and maximum child care payment rates. Most states had developed a single set of rules applying to three or four child care programs, but there was considerable variation in income eligibility limits and payment rates across states.

Before- and After-School Programs

Although many children spend substantial parts of their day in before- and after-school programs, little is known about the care these programs provide. In collaboration with RMC Research and Wellesley College, we surveyed 1,300 before- and/or after-school programs in 1990-1991. The study examined the prevalence, structure, and services of formal programs that care for children between the ages of 5 and 13 for at least four days per week and at least two hours per day.

Observing Child-Caregiver Interactions

Caregivers are an important element in the overall child care picture. For our evaluation of the Early Head Start program, we developed the Child-Caregiver Observation System (C-COS). This system documents which caregivers a child is interacting with, captures the nature and intensity of caregiver-child interactions, and measures the quality of the child’s interactions with other children in the child care setting. We also created an instructional manual, with videotapes for training and reliability testing, for using the system.

Expanding the Options Available

Supporting the care and education of young children from low-income families is an important policy goal. We have examined the benefits to low-income families of offering them higher-quality care than is normally available. We also looked at how ensuring continuous child care assistance affects these families. In the Expanded Child Care Options (ECCO) study, we designed research that focused on how child care affects children’s emotional, social, and educational development, as well as their parents’ labor market activity.

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