American child care today.

Abstract

Child care has 2 purposes: mothers' employment and children's development. These are conflicting goals, because the first focuses on the quantity and affordability of child care whereas the second favors expensive quality services. Affordable child care fosters maternal employment and gender equality. With welfare reform demanding more child-care places to move mothers from welfare to work, the pressure for larger quantities of child care is great. Demanding regulations raise the quality of care and give more assurance of children's well-being, but they also increase the cost. More expensive regulations price more working parents out of licensed care and force them to use unregulated home care. Widely varying qualities of child care have been shown to have only small effects on children's current development and no demonstrated long-term impact, except on disadvantaged children, whose homes put them at developmental risk. Parents have far greater impact on their children's development through both the genes and environments they provide. Thus, greater quantities of affordable, regulated child care may be possible.