The Influence of Local Price and Availability on Parents’ Choice of Child Care

The striking variation in patterns of child care usage across states reflects differences in family characteristics, but may also reflect exogenous differences in local child care markets. Type of care selected will be influenced by the availability, cost, and accessibility of supply in the child care market as well as by family and child characteristics and cultural preferences. This study contributes to the growing literature on parental demand for child care by using a recent detailed data set from the state of Minnesota. We link household-level data on child care usage and family characteristics with county-level data on average provider rates and availability by type of care in order to estimate multinomial logit models analyzing the family, child, and market characteristics that predict type of care. Our analysis shows that using a relative or friend to care for a child is largely determined by availability, and choice of family care providers is most responsive to price for employed mothers. The types of care chosen by mothers who are not in the paid labor force differ substantially from the choices of employed mothers, and their use of center care is influenced by the prices of both center and family providers. Attitudes towards relative care are also shown to influence type of care chosen.     

Availability of child care in the United States: A description and analysis of data sources

Lack of high-quality, affordable, and accessible child care is an often-cited impediment to a manageable balance between work and family. Researchers, however, have been restricted by a scarcity of data on the availability of child care across all U.S. communities. In this paper we describe and evaluate several indicators of child care availability that have been released by the U.S. Census Bureau over the last 15 years. Using community- and individual-level analyses, we find that these data sources are useful for indicating child care availability within communities, even though they were collected for other purposes. Furthermore, our results generally suggest that the data on child care availability are equally valid across communities of different urbanicity and average income levels, although it appears that larger geographic areas more accurately capture the child care market of centers than that of family day care providers. Our analyses indicate that center child care is least available in nonmetropolitan, poor communities, and that family day care is most available in nonmetropolitan, mixed-income communities. We discuss the benefits and limitations of the data sources, and point to directions for future data developments and research.     

Child care arrangements and fertility: An analysis of two-earner households

The determinants of child care arrangements and relations between child care and fertility are examined using data on two-earner households from the 1976 National Survey of Family Growth. We find that the probability of relying on market arrangements is higher among families in which the husband's income, the wife's wage, and the level of the wife's labor supply are high; these households are likely to benefit the most from subsidies to the market forms of care that are small relative to the total cost of care (e.g. the present system of tax credits). In addition, parental education, family size, child's age, race, religion, and place of residence have important influences on the choice of child care mode. When other factors are held constant, reliance on a relative for child care is positively associated with intentions to have further children among couples with infants and preschoolers.     

Cross-National Differences in the Association Between Parental Work Hours and Time with Children in Europe: A Multilevel Analysis

This study investigates cross-national differences in the association between parental work hours and parent–child interaction time and explains differences in this individual-level association on the basis of country characteristics. It extends prior research by testing the moderating effects of country characteristics through multilevel analyses and by considering the possibility of selection effects. The presumption was that parents employ strategies to protect family life from work encroachments and that these strategies are enhanced by reconciliation policies, stronger parenthood ideologies, access to part-time work and higher income levels. Multilevel analyses were based on a subset of 5.183 parents in 23 countries from the 2005 European Working Conditions Survey that was complemented with country-level data. The negative association between parental work hours and parent–child time indeed varied significantly across countries and was weaker in countries where formal child care coverage was higher, part-time work was less prevalent, and earnings were lower. The effects of part-time work and earnings mainly applied to mothers. These findings suggest that child care coverage limits the availability of children and that differences in parent–child time between parents who work short and long hours are more pronounced when part-time work is more accessible and affordable.     

A structural approach to women's hometime and experience-earnings profiles: Maternity leave and public policy

The differential availability of maternity leave benefits is shown to be an important factor in the earnings attainment process of women. Interaction effects with this job characteristic are found for experience, occupational status, and crowding. The human capital model's explanation of the relationship between women's hometime, women's job choice, and public policy is critically examined. The results indicate that the provision of adequate child care needs to be coupled with parental leave policies if women are to make significant gains in earnings from reducing their time spent at home.The data and tabulations used in this study were made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. The data were originally collected by Robert P. Quinn and Graham L. Staines. Neither they nor the Consortium bear any responsibility for the analysis or interpretations presented here. This paper was presented at the 1989 American Sociological Association meetings.     

Parental Socioeconomic Background and Child Behaviour

Although childhood obesity has long been in focus, little is known about the sensitivity of behavioural choices to measure parental resource constraints. The aim of this study is to examine the heterogeneous effects of children’s (or their parents’) choices of lifestyle subject to information and resource constraints, respectively. We address this issue using a unique longitudinal data set of almost 1,500 schoolchildren attending state schools between 2008 and 2010 in the Danish Municipality of Aalborg. One empirical strategy is to control for a rich set of child and parental characteristics; another is to use child fixed effect to control for fixed unobserved child characteristics. By including the interaction between child behaviour and parental socioeconomic background, a more complete but more complex picture arises. Our findings challenge the predominant assumption that behaviour and weight is a choice made by children, or their parents.     

Paternal child care and children's development

This paper uses the NLSY-Child data to assess the effects on cognitive and social-emotional development of father care as a child care arrangement among children in two-parent families with working mothers. Our results show that father care for infants is no better or worse than other types of arrangements. However, toddlers in non-paternal modes of child care (e.g., relatives, family day care or center care) have slightly better cognitive outcomes than those whose fathers provided care. Although our analyses do not provide a definitive explanation for this finding, there is a substantial influx of fathers in our data who provide child care in years 2 and 3 and these fathers appear compositionally different from fathers who provided care during a child's infancy. In particular, there is some indication that these fathers who are newly providing care during a child's toddler years may be temporary care providers due to changing economic circumstances. The research was supported by NICHD grant #HD30944. Responsible editor: Deborah Cobb-Clark.     

Does care matter? Care capital and mothers’ time to paid employment

The aim of this study is to introduce the concept of care capital and provide an example of its application in the context of childcare and maternal employment using the currently most suitable American data. We define care capital as the nexus of available, accessible, and experienced resources for care. The American setting is an ideal context to investigate the linkages between child care capital and maternal employment as the patterns of child care use tend to be more diverse compared to other national contexts. In the presented application of care capital, we examine mothers’ entry to paid employment during the first 36 weeks following a birth, and its association with the experience of non-parental child care use before labour force entry. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey—Birth Cohort (N = 10,400 mothers), results from discrete-time hazard models show that use of non-parental child care prior to employment is independently and positively associated with entry into maternal employment. This finding applies both to first-time mothers (n = 3,800) and to mothers of multiple children (n = 6,600). Although data currently available for investigating child care capital are limited with regard to care availability and access, our results suggests that childcare availability, access, and use, understood as a form of capital alongside economic and human capital, should be considered in future studies of maternal employment.     

Self-care: Why do parents leave their children unsupervised?

We used a preferences-and-constraints model to develop four hypotheses to explain why parents may choose self-care (an unsupervised arrangement) as the primary child care arrangement for their children over supervised alternatives and tested them in a multivariate framework using 1995 data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. We found that the choice of self-care over supervised care alternatives is linked to the availability of parents' time to care for children, the child's level of responsibility and maturity, and the neighborhood context. However, we found no evidence that parents' ability to pay for child care is related to the choice of self-care. The results also suggest that parents use different decision-making processes, depending on their children's ages.     

Child care for preschoolers: Differences by child’s age

Because of the high rates of employment of mothers, a large and increasing number of preschool children receive regular care from someone else. This article develops and tests hypotheses about the choice of child care arrangements for younger and older preschool children, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women. We argue that appropriate care depends on the age of the child. It includes care by the mother or a paid provider in the child's home for children aged 0-2 and mother care and nursery school or center care for those 3-5. We estimate models of the mother's employment and choice of child care separately for younger and older preschoolers. Our results show that need for care, presence of substitutes for the mother, financial resources, and preferences all affect both full-time care by the mother and the type of child care chosen by working women, although they affect these two decisions in different ways.     

Child care availability and first-birth timing in Norway

Both sociological and economic theories posit that widely available, high-quality, and affordable child care should have pronatalist effects. Yet to date, the empirical evidence has not consistently supported this hypothesis. We argue that this previous empirical work has been plagued by the inability to control for endogenous placement of day care centers and the possibility that people migrate to take advantage of the availability of child care facilities. Using Norwegian register data and a statistically defensible fixed-effects model, we find strong positive effects of day care availability on the transition to motherhood.     

Preschoolers with working mothers

This research examines the determinants of child care mode choice for the preschool-age children of working mothers. Attention is focused on two main questions. First, do increases in economic resources raise the likelihood that center care arrangements will be employed? And second, is there a quality-quantity tradeoff in the context of child care? A multinomial logit analysis of data on preschoolers from the 1982 National Survey of Family Growth (conducted in the United States) yields positive answers to both of these questions.     

The Effect of a First Born Child on Work and Childcare Time Allocation: Pre-post Analysis of Australian Couples

This paper uses Australian data from a national representative sample of Australian couples having their first child. Using data from before and after the birth of the child on a range of variables, including economic resources, gender attitudes, workplace flexibility, and availability of non-parental childcare, we first model the factors are associated with the decision to remain in work or not after the birth of the first child. The main finding here is that childbirth has a major impact on mothers’ paid work-time, whereas for fathers it has very little impact. Factors that are related to a mother’s decision to remain in work or not include the absolute (but not relative) pay of each parent, the father’s workplace flexibility, and paid parental leave available to the mother. We then model the factors that govern, for those mothers remaining in paid work, how much paid work they undertake. We find that changing employers is related to mothers’ work hours, as are absolute post-birth salaries, as is the relative pay of each partner. As with the decision to work or not, the availability of paid parental leave to the mother is significantly related to the amount of work-time for those mothers that do continue to work. Similarly, the use of external childcare is positively associated with maternal work hours. Finally, we model the factors that determine childcare time allocation and find that for neither parent do pre-birth economic resources significantly affect childcare time, once a decision about basic work patterns has been made. Gender role attitudes affect childcare time decisions, unlike work time decisions.     

The Effects of School Choice on Parental School Participation and School Satisfaction in Korea

This study examines the effects of the school choice policy by utilizing data from the Seoul Education Longitudinal Study. Specifically, the school participation and school satisfaction of parents whose child entered high school in 2010 through the high school choice policy are analyzed. The results reveal that the opportunity for school choice itself is not strongly relevant to parental participation in school. Parental participation in school is influenced more by individual factors than institutional factors. In addition, providing school choice does not lead to an increase in parental school satisfaction. Whether the students actually entered the school they preferred during the school choice phases has more significance than only having the right of choice. Based on the results, the implications of the study and some suggestions for the school choice policy in Korea are discussed.     

Young women’s transition to marriage

This paper examines determinants of timing of marriage for young women by modeling the transition from the single to the married state by age. This approach, combined with a large longitudinal data set, allows us to disaggregate the analysis into fine age groupings and to include situational and attitudinal factors in our model. We find that those characteristics of a young woman’s parental family that reflect the availability of parental resources tend to decrease the chances of a marriage during the early teens. Chances of marrying appear to decrease with increases in the availability and attractiveness of alternatives to the wife role and in the costs of assuming it. We discuss these results from the perspective of the societal and parental normative pressures which affect timing of marriage for young women.     

A welcome family planning service center

The Family Planning Service Center of Luohu District was organized by the Family Planning Committee of the district to help couples of child bearing age and 1-child families to overcome their difficulties. The services provided by the center include: distributing contraceptives, and providing consultation on birth control, contraception, healthy births and better upbringing, and maternal and child care. A peculiar feature of the center is that one sees many young and middle-aged people of both sexes going in and out of the place at all hours of the day and night. Workers from the center even go to offices and factories to provide services and distribute contraceptives. In close cooperation with neighborhood family planning centers, the center has also set up offices to distribute contraceptives and give advice. It is estimated that in Luohu District, at present, 90% of the couples of childbearing age are current users of contraceptives. In the city, the proportion of 1-child families is quite large. As a rule in China, preschool children are looked after by their grandparents. Living separately from their parents, however, many couples in the city find it difficult to find someone to care for their children. The center also provides assistance in finding child care help. The center has also invited experts and medical personnel to give 10 lectures on child nutriology, child psychology, birth control, contraception and pregnancy health.     

Time use in child care and housework and the total cost of children

The use of time for child care and housework among Swedish families is investigated. We allow the effect of children on child care and housework to vary by age of the child and also by whether the child is cared for outside the home or not. Our estimates allow us to compute the total cost of children in the form of the cost of time, and the cost of goods, services and housing.The result shows that time used for child care decreases sharply with the age of the child but this is not the case for time used for other housework. Considerable economies of scale is found to prevail for time used for child care. Child care outside the home reduces time use for other housework but the effect on time used for child care is quite small. For the average family time use cost make up more than half of total child cost. Our estimates indicate that decreased time use cost for children caused by care outside the home are not very different from a typical parental fee for public day care.This research was supported by a grant from the Swedish Council of Social Research (SFR). We thank Lennart Flood for useful comments on an earlier version.     

Familial Effect on Child Poverty in Hong Kong Immigrant Families

This study investigated how family context affect poverty disparities between young children of immigrants from the Mainland China and children of local families whose parents were born in Hong Kong using 2006 bicensus data. 12,609 and 12,753 children of immigrant and local families were included in our data analyses. We find higher child poverty rates in immigrant families than in local families. Moreover, we found that family structure (single-parent vs. 2-parent), assimilation (first vs. second generation children of immigrant families), and parental human capital characteristics are significantly associated with the child poverty risk. Surprisingly, the impact of immigrant status on child poverty rates is stronger in 2-parent households than in single-parent households while child poverty declines associated with increasing assimilation defined by generational status of children are greater in 2-parent immigrant families than the corresponding declines in single-parent immigrant families. The implications of our results in intergenerational poverty are discussed.     

Self-employment and providing child care

This paper considers self-employment and providing child care as occupational strategies that can lower the cost of child care. If the ability to care for one's own children while engaged in market work is important to mothers with young children, we predict that women with young children will be more likely to choose to be self-employed or to be a child care provider than women without young children. The analysis provides strong support for this hypothesis. The results show that the presence of young children is an important factor in choosing self-employment and in choosing to be a child care provider. Finally, simulations are presented which show that a woman's choice among these sectors is quite sensitive to the number and ages of her young children.