Rethinking the Child Care Sector

Abstract

This paper challenges traditional models of the child care industry by emphasizing the importance of unpaid family work. Time use surveys provide a means of integrating estimates of its market value into regional planning models. These studies suggest that parental “quality” time with children and paid child care are complements, rather than substitutes, for one another. Quantification of the important family work that parents do can strengthen the case for instituting policies that offer parents more support and flexibility, such as paid family leaves from work and publicly provided child care.