Child Care Choices among Families with Preschool-Aged Children in Taiwan

Abstract

Using 1991 and 1996 Children's Living Status Survey (CLSS) data and childcare data from various sources, this study examines families' childcare choices for their' preschool children. A Multinomial Logit model is used to analyze whether families' socio-demographic factors are important to families' childcare choices, as well as whether policies that improve the quality of child care or reduce its costs for parents would affect families' childcare choices. The results indicate that families' childcare choices are varied by family's need for care, mother's tastes and preferences, the availability of informal care, and the cost of center care. However, the effect of the number of children per child care worker (presumably the quality of care) does not have a significant effect on families' decisions about care arrangements, although the effects are in the expected direction. The contribution of this paper is that this is the first work to jointly examine the socio-demographic factors (representing the resources inside the family) and the contextual factors (representing the resources outside the family) on families' childcare choices for their pre-school age children in the hope that by understanding the important determinants of families' decisions, a sound child care or family policy can be formulated to meet the different needs of families with young children in search of the accessible and high quality of child care for their pre-school age children.