Child Care Market Research Articles

The "Production" of Child Care: How Labor Markets Shape Social Policy and Vice Versa

This article examines child care policies in three countries-France, Sweden, and the United States-to explore the links between labor markets and social policy and to probe the applicability of the “varieties of capitalism” literature to the human services. Countries differ in the extent to which they subsidize early childhood care and education programs, reflecting, in part, the nature of the child care workforce. In liberal market economies such as the United States, a low-skill, low-wage workforce has enabled a private market of child care to develop, letting federal and state governments off the hook from having to subsidize these programs. In the more coordinated market economies of Western Europe, by contrast, higher labor market regulations, wages, and rates of unionization raise the cost of labor and impede the growth of a private child care market. As a result, governments aiming to promote women’s employment or assure the education of young children will feel pressed to provide extensive public subsidies for these services. While these differences reflect long-standing variations in labor market skill regimes, strong public sector unions also shape diverging trajectories in the “production” of child care services.

Market Childcare: Preliminary Considerations of a ‘Property View’ of the Child

A recent study of grandparents who were caring for their young grandchildren on a regular basis has prompted an examination of what appears to be a paradox surrounding the provision of childcare services within Australia. The paradox reflects concerns surrounding the balance between a commitment to high-quality childcare services for children and families and the means by which this may be achieved. The choice that grandparents made to care for their grandchildren in caring and loving environments reflects a humanistic perspective. However, some grandparents raised concerns about what may be considered to be a property view of the child that places childcare within the context of a competitive marketplace. This article explores these issues using terminology drawn from the marketplace to traverse what appears to be an abyss between a business orientation and more humanistic approaches to early childhood education. Following the introduction of the paradox and an examination of market characteristics, the article concludes with questions about who the childcare consumer is, a consideration of approaches to consumer protection and reflections on childcare provision.

Making Care Work: Employed Mothers in the New Child Care Market

Making Care Work: Employed Mothers in the New Child Care Market. Lynet Uttal. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2002. 208 pp. ISBN 0-8135-311-X. $22.00 (paper). Although numerous articles and books have examined the increased rates of employment among mothers and the increased need for child care, few researchers have examined the mechanisms that mothers use to select and maintain care for their children. To fill this gap, Lynet Uttal offers a rich and illuminating study of the paid care system and the burdens that mothers shoulder to find and maintain adequate care for their children. Using interviews with 48 employed mothers from Memphis, Tennessee and Santa Cruz, California, Uttal illustrates how the political and economic terrain of child care has changed for working mothers. It is well documented that the use of relative care in the United States has declined, while the use of market-based care has increased. Uttal argues that the shift in the sources of child care from family to the private market has altered the way that mothers locate and come to terms with their child-care selections. Unlike other services that can be purchased from the private market, child care is a complex and emotional commodity. To grapple with the difficulty of finding the right care, Uttal shows that mothers employed several techniques, including hiring providers with similar childrearing values and/or racial backgrounds and finding arrangements that offer educational opportunities. In addition, mothers often tried to find care that they believed would serve as a competent maternal substitute. Although Uttal nicely details how mothers find care in the emerging child-care market, her most important contribution to the literature is her analysis of the experience of transferring one's children to paid caregivers (p. 117). In contrast to other studies, Uttal goes beyond issues of supply and demand and instead heightens our understanding of not only the child-care system but also the changing context of motherhood in the early 21st century. The child-care process does not simply end once a mother finds an arrangement; instead, mothers often struggle to find a balance between care and market-based principles. Uttal explains that there is no social script that mothers can use to sustain their child-care arrangements. To maintain their child-care arrangements, the mothers in Uttal's study develop interpersonal relationships with their child-care providers so that they can manage, negotiate, and monitor the care that their children receive. …

Making Care Work: Employed Mothers in the New Child Care Market

Journal of Marriage and FamilyVolume 66, Issue 2 p. 544-545 Making Care Work: Employed Mothers in the New Child Care Market Lynda Laughlin, Lynda Laughlin Temple UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Lynda Laughlin, Lynda Laughlin Temple UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 28 June 2008 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2004.0br_3.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume66, Issue2May 2004Pages 544-545 RelatedInformation

Making Care Work: Employed Mothers in the New Childcare Market

An account of an important aspect of modern family life - the connections between mothers and their children's caregivers. It reveals that mothers walk a fine line between wanting to believe in the quality of care they have chosen, and the fact that they might have made a mistake.

Do child care regulations affect the child care and labor markets?

AbstractThe effect of child care regulations on outcomes in the child care market and the labor market for mothers of young children is examined. The analysis uses a time series of cross sections and examines the robustness of previous cross‐section findings to controls for state‐level heterogeneity. Child care regulations as a group have statistically significant effects on most outcomes, with or without state fixed effects. However, regulations do not vary enough within state over time to allow precise identification of most individual regulation effects. The great majority of estimated regulation effects in all specifications are small and insignificantly different from 0. Some of the estimated effects seem reasonable in sign and magnitude, but others are clearly implausible. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Child Care Subsidies, Welfare Reforms, and Lone Mothers

Recent social assistance reforms appear to have reduced welfare rolls, but the effects on the well‐being of those families and their children are less clear. Using simulations based on Canadian data, we find that some currently favored alternatives turn out to be effective in encouraging employment but punitive to families. Increased subsidization of market child care combined with income support for families appears to deliver a number of family‐supportive outcomes.

If you build it, they will come: parental use of on-site child care centers

Employer-sponsored on-site child care, although a smallpercentage of the U.S. child care market, is of substantial interest to families, firms andgovernments searching for relief from work/family conflicts. This paper analyzes employee surveydata from three firms in the same industry and local labor market, two of which offer on-sitechild care while one does not. These data allow for detailed descriptive and multivariate analysisof the child care strategies of working parents, including primary, secondary and Saturdaycare, and how such strategies are affected by the availability of employer-sponsored on-site care.

A Market in Love? Choosing Pre‐school Childcare

Abstract The article is an initial consideration of data collected for a project exploring working parents' choices of care for their pre‐school children. First, the policy developments in this area are reviewed. However, the heart of the article is an analysis of the ways in which the sample of mainly white middle‐class mothers operates within the childcare market. The impact of class and gender upon their choices is considered, and the strategies the women use to personalise the market are mapped. The authors conclude that despite their relatively advantaged position as consumers, the women's control of the market‐based relations that develop remains imperfect and incomplete as they negotiate the tensions between work and domestic responsibilities.

Can Consumers Detect Lemons? Information Asymmetry in the Market for Child Care

This paper applies direct tests for adverse selection and moral hazard in the market for child care. A unique data set containing quality measures of various characteristics of child care provided by 746 rooms in 400 centers, as well as the evaluation of the same attributes by 3,490 affiliated consumers (parents) is employed. Comparisons of consumer evaluations of quality to actual quality show that, after adjusting for scale effects, parents are weakly rational. The hypothesis of strong rationality is rejected, indicating that parents do not utilize all available information in forming their assessment of quality. Parent characteristics impact the accuracy of their evaluations. An analysis of easy-to-observe versus difficult-to-observe aspects of quality reveals that parents are trying to extract signals more heavily in cases of difficult-to-observe items. A comparison of parent assessments to results obtained from standard quality production functions reveals that, for the most part, parents interpret the signals incorrectly. The results demonstrate the existence of information asymmetry and adverse selection in the market. There is some limited evidence for moral hazard as nonprofit centers with very clean reception areas tend to produce lower level of quality for unobservable items. These results provide an explanation for low average quality in the child care market.

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 and the Welfare to Work Transition

We assess the role of child care in the welfare to work transition using an unusually large and comprehensive data base. Our data are for Massachusetts, a state that began welfare reform in 1995 under a federal waiver, for the period July 1996 through August 1997. We find that both the nature of the child care market and the availability of subsidized care and early education affect the probability that current and former welfare recipients will work. Regarding the child care market, we find that the cost, stability and quality of care matter. We also find that child care subsidies and some types of early education serve to increase employment. To be more specific, we find that increased funding for child care subsidies and the availability of full day kindergarten significantly increase the probability the current and former welfare recipients work.

Market Constraints on Child Care Quality

This article uses the data from Cost, Quality and Child Outcomes in Child Care Centers, The Study of Children in Family Child Care and Relative Care, and the Economics of Family Child Care Project to argue that most child care in the United States today is mediocre or worse and that this mediocrity is the result of supply and demand conditions in the market for child care. Imperfect knowledge on the part of suppliers and researchers about how to efficiently provide good care limits quality. More important, monopolistic competition with a broad range of modes of care, each with different cost structures, forces centers without subsidies to cut their costs in order to compete. Many parents cannot afford the cost of high-quality care, and even those who can afford it have trouble identifying it. Policy to improve quality needs to be multifaceted. Regulation, incentives, and training will help providers who either do not care about quality or do not understand how to create it. Subsidies are needed for parents who cannot afford the cost of quality care. Information and ratings of providers will help the parents who cannot identify quality or do not appreciate its importance.

Income-Pooling Arrangements, Economic Constraints, and Married Mothers' Child Care Choices

This study investigates whether financial agreements between husbands and wives, the cost of child care, mothers' wages, and sources of income, rather than just aggregate income, affect a mother's decision to use child care. This study finds that for working mothers, the price of child care is what matters, not their wages; for nonemployed mothers, the reverse is true. However, similar patterns for income effects are found for all mothers. Husbands' incomes do not affect mothers' child care choices, but mothers' own abilities to pay and sources of nonwage income do affect their child care choices. The only detected effect of spouses' incomes on wives' child care choices occurs when husbands pool their incomes with their wives' incomes. Hence, although market child care is a collective consumption good, not all wives in two-parent families have access to husbands' incomes with which to pay for child care.

Influence of Client‐Based Subsidies on the Market for Child Care

Federal support for child care subsidies targeted to poor households has grown dramatically in recent years. The analysis presented here examines the impact of such subsidies on child care fees charged to all clients using Missouri data on provider fees and subsidy payments. It is found that patterns for fees and subsidies across providers imply that child care markets are largely competitive. Growth in subsidies observed over the period 1991–1993 increased fees and, by inference, improved quality for subsidized clients. Subsidies also induced an increase in fees for clients not covered by subsidies, an increase most likely due to the cost of expanding the child care market.

Child-Care Services and the Urban Labour Market. Part 1: The Urban Child-Care Market

In this two-part paper we examine some of the market characteristics of urban child-care services. Part 1 is concerned with theory. In it we review the contemporary child-care and preschool education service issue; consider questions of market efficiency and equity, and formulate these in a general equilibrium model which generates testable household labour-supply and service-supply functions. In part 2 we report on an empirical study in which aggregate versions of these functions are calibrated for the supply of labour from mothers with young children and for the supply of childminding services. We focus on the childminder sector, which is of interest as a personal social service that has traditionally been left to the private sector and as a private service with relatively easy entry and exit. These models yield interesting results which indicate on the one hand that access to child-care services is a binding constraint on female labour-market participation and on the other, that the supply of child-care services is quite unresponsive to demand.

Caring for Preschool Children in Urban Brazil

ABSTRACT: This paper examines modes of child care choice for young children in urban Brazil. Analysis of child care in developing countries is rare, in spite of its relevance to many policy issues. We model child care choice as a function of characteristics of the child and the mother, including the mother's predicted wage and probability of employment, the presence of other young children and potential caregivers. The results highlight the importance of the institutional structure of the labour market and the formal child care market and reveal policy‐relevant information regarding the allocation of child care responsibility among household members.

Market Child Care Versus Care by Relatives

We study the determinants of whether mothers of preschool-aged children use market child care versus care by relatives to assess the importance of economics versus preferences. The evidence suggests that employed mothers turn to relatives for child care partly out of preference, not just because relatives are inexpensive. Public policies that encourage the use of relatives for child care might therefore increase parental satisfaction and quality of care. The analysis finds substantially similar results for African American and other women, but the results for employed mothers differ from those for nonemployed women, who appear to use child care primarily to enhance child development.

Female Household Investment Strategy in Human and Non-Human Capital with the Risk of Divorce

It is shown that a female investment strategy in human and non-human capital where a woman intends to take time out of the paid labour market for childcare is consistent with traditional gender roles in marriage. However, this is not the case in an environment of marital instability. As marital stability has decreased in recent years it should be expected that both gender roles and fcmale investment strategy should also have changed. Yet traditional gendcr roles appear to be more persistent than would be expected. A qualitative survey of decision- making in families undertaken in Exeter, England, appears to support this finding. One result of following traditional gender roles where the risk of marital instability is high is that women may become vulnerable and suffer considerably in economic terms following separation or divorce. This may imply scope for radical reform of marriage and divorce and also bettcr strategies for female investment in human and non-human capital.

A Structural Model of Labor Supply and Child Care Demand

This paper specifies and estimates a structural model in which the decision to purchase market child care-and the quality purchased-is made simultaneously with the employment decision of the mother. Separate analyses are performed for married mothers and single mothers. The structural estimates are used to simulate the effects and costs of changes in the federal child care tax credit. The simulations indicate that a refundable child care tax credit would distribute child care benefits more equally across the population by increasing the shares of subsidies received by low-income families, and would induce a considerable increase in expenditures on market child care. Labor supply also increases, but by considerably less than child care expenditures. A surprising result is that, despite large increases in child care