Need For Child Care Research Articles

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. …

Early child care choices: a theoretical model and research implications

The purpose of this study was to propose a theoretical model that relates mothers' selection of child care type to each of the contexts of the proposed model, and then to test the model in a group of forty‐seven mothers of young children (center care users, family day care users, or users in combination of the two) who were recruited in the Mid‐West. Statistical analysis was primarily performed for two groups of mothers (center care users versus family day care users) to investigate differences in each of the paths of the child care selection model. Additional analysis of the group of mothers alternating between the two found that there is a great need for child care among working mothers, and a diversity in their preference of child care type exists even with such a small sample size. Findings from the pilot study substantiated the paths in the model. Directions for future research in this area using the proposed model were provided.

Decision to Leave Scale: Perceived Reasons to Stay in or Leave Violent Relationships

The 30-item Decision to Leave Scale (DLS) was developed with 631 college women and 420 college women and women in shelters. Seven DLS subscales emerged for concerns in deciding to stay or leave: Fear of Loneliness, Child Care Needs, Financial Problems, Social Embarrassment, Poor Social Support, Fear of Harm, Hopes Things Change. Mean internal reliability was .73, mean test-retest reliability was .70. Discriminant validity was demonstrated by expected associations between DLS concerns and self-esteem, children, and violence. Criterion validity was demonstrated by greater DLS concerns for women in shelters than for college women. Women in violent relationships who decided to stay reported more Fear of Loneliness than women who decided to leave.

The Effect of Child Care Costs on the Employment and Welfare Recipiency of Single Mothers

1. Introduction For all mothers of young children, entering the labor market is strongly linked with the need for child care. Opportunities for caring for children while in the labor market are few in a developed economy. In many cases, the husband or another family member serves as caregiver, but approximately 50%Ic of preschoolers with a working mother are cared for by nonrelatives (Casper 1997). Some of these arrangements involve a substantial amount of money. In 1993, the average weekly cost of care was $59 for home-based care, $68 for center-based care, and $48 for care provided by a relative. This can represent one-fourth of earnings for single mothers working full time at the minimum wage (Kimmel 1994). Such substantial money expenditures, coupled with transportation needs both to work and to day care, as well as the uncertainty of many child care arrangements, are expected to keep many mothers of young children out of the labor market. Thus, the relationship between employment and child care for these mothers is thought to play a strong role in the link between welfare recipiency and child care. Welfare programs before and after welfare reform have targeted child care as a barrier to employment.1 Before welfare reform, child care subsidies were available to some recipients through federal Title IV-A funding sources for child care (AFDC/JOBS, At-Risk, Transitional Child Care) and through the Child Care Development Block Grant. These funds often came with matching requirements from the states. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) consolidated all these funds into state block grants, thereby permitting the states to design their own child care assistance schemes. States may supplement federal child care block grants with state dollars, but there is no longer a required state match. Thus, while the total federal dollar amount allocated to child care in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) exceeds former federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) child care commitments, because TANF requires less in state matching expenditures, it is unclear what will happen to total child care expenditures as welfare reform evolves. Early postreform evidence suggests that while overall child care spending at the state level has increased, the increase is less than would have occurred had the matching requirements been retained. A recent study of welfare leavers reports that few are receiving subsidies (Schumacher and Greenberg 1999), and only 1.24 million of the approximately 10 million children eligible for federally funded support received assistance in 1997 (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1999). Underlying states' expenditures on child care subsidies are their subsidy eligibility guidelines, participation in such subsidy programs by the eligible population, and availability of subsidized slots or funds for those families applying for such funds. Only a small percentage of families eligible for subsidies based on the federal maximum income limits receive such support. Federal guidelines as outlined in PRWORA stipulate that federally financed child care subsidies can be made available to families with incomes up to 85% of the state's median income. However, as of July 1999, only five states had set their eligibility guidelines at the federal maximum. In addition, participation by the state-defined eligible group is quite low, partially because of a lack of information. City officials in San Francisco have used an innovative peer outreach program to increase participation by the eligible population, and by the start of 2000, the city was enrolling 50% of the estimated eligible population, an enrollment rate twice the statewide average (Heymann 2000b). Extensive data on post-TANF behavior are not yet available, nor will they be for some time. However, there is some evidence that workers continue to report that availability and cost of child care are barriers to self-sufficiency. …

Welfare “Recidivism” among Former Welfare Recipients

With welfare reform soundly launched and its effects already praised, it is time to examine its impact on former welfare recipients. A typology of adaptation to welfare—comprising dependency, supplementation, self-reliance, and autonomy—was developed based on former welfare recipients' financial status and employment status. An examination was also made of ways in which welfare recipients changed from more independent modes of adaptation (autonomy and self-reliance) to less independent modes (supplementation and dependency). Using longitudinal data extracted from a U. S. Department of Labor survey, event history analysis was applied to investigate changes in adaptation mode and factors contributing to these changes, among former welfare recipients across a period of 1 8 years. The investigation found that return to welfare was uncommon. Furthermore, the results show that nonpoor former recipients most often joined the ranks of the working poor because of welfare reform, ethnicity, education level, occupational skills, family income, housing subsidy, child care, and prior experience in welfare use. Some nonpoor former recipients who spent long spells in welfare returned to welfare because they suffered income reductions and needed food stamps. Working poor former recipients were likely to become nonpoor if they were married and had no need for child care or food stamps. Working poor White, single mothers with little work experience and little child support were likely to return to welfare and become further dependent on it.

Child Care Needs and Work-Life Implications

The need for child care is a work-life issue that affects families across all income levels. These issues are particularly challenging in rural areas, where nontraditional child care services may be more limited. Using data from a rural county in Virginia, this article examines income level differences in parents’ reported child care needs. We compare income groups along six variables. Our results suggest that lower income households have significantly more child care needs than moderate or upper income households along three of the variables: need for different hours, need for child care closer to home, and need for special-needs child care. These findings have implications for human resource managers as they consider work-life policies in their organization.

Women and Alcoholism: A Biopsychosocial Perspective and Treatment Approaches

Viewing alcoholism in women from a biopsychosocial perspective reveals a unique set of circumstances and challenges that women alcoholics face when compared with men. Biologically, women react differently to alcohol ingestion than do men. Women reach higher blood alcohol levels and sustain more somatic and cognitive damage than men when consuming equivalent amounts of alcohol. Psychosocially, women alcoholics face societal rebuke and chastisement of a greater magnitude than do men. Finally, barriers to treatment faced by women, such as the need for child care, cost of treatment, familial opposition, denial of alcoholism, and inadequate diagnostic training of physicians, must be overcome to create successful treatment approaches for the female alcoholic. Obstacles to and implications for treatment are also discussed.

Health Care Needs of Children in the Foster Care System

Nearly 750 000 children are currently in foster care in the United States. Recent trends in foster care include reliance on extended family members to care for children in kinship care placements, increased efforts to reduce the length of placement, acceleration of termination of parental rights proceedings, and emphasis on adoption. It is not clear what impact welfare reform may have on the number of children who may require foster care placement. Although most children enter foster care with medical, mental health, or developmental problems, many do not receive adequate or appropriate care while in placement. Psychological and emotional problems, in particular, may worsen rather than improve. Multiple barriers to adequate health care for this population exist. Health care practitioners can help to improve the health and well-being of children in foster care by performing timely and thorough admission evaluations, providing continuity of care, and playing an active advocacy role. Potential areas for health services research include study of the impact of different models of health care delivery, the role of a medical home in providing continuity of care, the perception of the foster care experience by the child, children's adjustment to foster care, and foster parent education on health outcomes.

Are children properly classified within the scope of expert assessment to determine need for services?

This project deals with assessment directives issued by the leading statutory care insurance companies to define the need for care of children at certain ages in coping with the activities of daily life specified by the German Social Legislation. The ages in question relate to healthy, normally developed children. They are used as a measure of comparison for the assessment of diseased children. Besides, they have a decisive significance in defining the need for care. Only if a child is not able to perform a certain activity, although it is meant to be able to do so at that age, can we define the need for help and assistance, i.e. care. The project is divided into two sections. 1. Comparison of age mentioned in the assessment directives for each of the daily life activities of healthy and normally developed children aged 1 to 12 years with the age mentioned in technical literature. 2. Comparison of age mentioned in the assessment directives for each ot the daily life activities of healthy and normally developed children at the age of 1 to 12 years with those mentioned in retrospective interviews with the same group of children. In the first part of the project, an analysis of the literature dealing with the subject was done. The literature included the stock of technical literature in the German language. Studying the literature, ages for children could be isolated, that could be classed with the activities of daily life mentioned in the German Social Code. These ages were compared with those in the assessment directives. In a second part of the project, 81 mothers and fathers of healthy, normally developed children aged 1 to 12 years were asked via a questionnaire. They were asked to estimate retrospectively from what age on their child had been able to perform certain activities of daily life without any help. The comparison of ages mentioned in the assessment directives with those of the analysis of literature conformed only regarding daily life activity. Regarding the other activities of daily life the age for children was set higher in the assessment directives than in the literature. Comparing the age of children in the assessment directives with the results of the questionnaires the age was also set higher in the directives than shown by the results of the questionnaires. The results of the literature analysis and the inquiry by questionnaires show that the ages mentioned in the assessment directives for an independent performance of daily life activities do not correspond to the development according to the age of healthy normally developed children aged 1 to 12 years. As a result of this project it seems to be justified to be doubtful about an adequate assessment of children who are in the need of care. Due to this reason it would be desirable to reexamine the data of the assessment directives by means of a new representative prospective study.

Assessing child care need under welfare reform

Abstract Suggestions for improvements to this research by Sherrill Friedman, Paula Brush and Subhash Sonnad are gratefully acknowledged. With the advent of welfare reform, recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) are now required to enter the workforce. This workforce entry brings the need for child care. Two problems concerning child care emerge: poor women participating in the workforce at entry level jobs often require child care during hours when care is not readily available (Miranne & Young, 1998); and welfare reform s work requirement will necessitate a predicted ten percent increase in child care services (Maynard, 1989), while only a four percent increase in funding for child care is being mandated by the federal government (Blank, 1997). This essay explores welfare reform and its effect on child care availability by demonstrating its impact at a local level.

Development of scales to measure psychosocial care needs of children with seizures and their parents. 1.

There is little research and no self-report assessment instruments available to guide nurses in the provision of psychosocial care to children with seizures and their families. Information on the development of two instruments, Report of Psychosocial Care Scale and Child Report of Psycyhosocial Care Scale, and their use in a research study to measure psychosocial care of children with new-onset seizures and their parents are presented in three parts. This first article describes development and initial testing of their psychometric properties. The second article, Part 2, "Psychosocial Care Needs of Parents of Children with New-Onset Seizures," describes results from the use of the parent scale with mothers and fathers of children with new-onset seizures. The third article, Part 3, "Psychosocial Care Needs of Children with New-Onset Seizures," reports findings from the use of the child scale with children ages 8-14 years with new-onset seizures.

A study of rural Latino women seeking cancer-detection examinations.

The Latino women's breast and cervical cancer screening project, A Day for Latino Women, was a well-organized, collaborative effort between the Catholic community outreach program serving the rural Latino community, the local university, the university nursing program, and a rural-nurse-managed clinic. Eighty-one women were screened at the rural-nurse-managed clinic (TCHC) at no cost. Barriers to access such as the need for transportation, cost, and the need for child care were essentially eliminated to encourage use of the TCHC as a usual site of medical care for this ethnic population. Use of female FNP students attempted to eliminate traditional cultural embarrassment regarding examination by men. Peer relationships and social support for bilingual members of Centro Cuerpo de Cristo Catholic Ministry assisted in promotion and delivery of services to these women.

Supporting children and families in the schools: the school of the 21st century.

The School of the 21st Century, a model designed to address the soaring need for child care, is housed in an institution already present in every neighborhood-the public school. Its potential to serve as a primary prevention program, through provision of child-care and family-support services for children from birth through age 12, is described. Examples of program effectiveness are offered, and the additional benefits of integration with related programs are outlined.

FRIENDLY, Martha, CHILD CARE POLICY IN CANADA: Putting the Pieces Together

FRIENDLY, Martha, CHILD CARE POLICY IN CANADA: Putting the Pieces Together. Don Mills, Ontario: Addison-Wesley, 1994, 294pp., $32.95 softcover. In the mid-nineties in Canada, child care is a topic on which there has been much scholarly and policy thinking, but virtually no political action. A plank of three federal election campaigns (in 1984, 1988 and 1993), child care is more of a predicament now, according to Friendly, than it was in the 1980s. The contradictions apparent in contemporary concern about balancing work and family, about equality of women in the workplace and in society, and at the same time, the policy neglect of child come alive in Friendly's book, the essential thesis of which is that Canada needs a system of child not as a welfare program, but as an essential public service. The book is organized into four sections: Part 1 addresses what child care is and is not, and how high quality child care benefits children, families, women, and the broader society. Part 2 explores how the absence of a national child care policy in Canada has contributed to uneven and unreliable availability of services. Part 3 provides a history of the development of child care in Canada from the nineteenth century, through the advocacy groups of the past few decades, and into current national debates. Part 4 brings together the pieces of a proposed policy framework for a Canadian child care system including universal accessibility, public funding, comprehensiveness, and high quality. Care Policy in Canada consists of twelve chapters in addition to preface and introduction. The book's cover shows several advocacy buttons including one that captures the essence of the need for a child care system in Canada, as argued by Friendly. It simply states, Child Care Keeps Taxpaying Parents Working. A 1991 Daily Food Bank of Toronto survey, cited in the book, indetifies child care responsibilities as the reason for not working among almost one-quarter of food bank users. With eroding social services, including child care accessibility since 1991 with cuts to programs in several provinces, it may well be that those not working because of problems with child care has risen. It has become clear in recent years, paralleling the Social Policy Review, that those not working create a double challenge to the Canadian economy: they do not contribute income taxes which public coffers much need in the 1990s, and they often need public support (unemployment insurance and/or social assistance) which create demand on those same public coffers. If the reason for unemployment for such a significant proporation of food bank users is lack of child then providing child care would be a cost-effective solution to an expensive, and likely growing, social problem. Equality for women cannot be achieved without access to child care, states Friendly, without equivocation (p.22). She provides compelling evidence and argument in support of this conclusion throughout the book. For example, analyses of the National Care Survey find in 1993 that despite the dramatic increase in women's labour market participation in recent years, even among mothers of young children, the rate of labour market participation among single mothers with pre-school children remains considerably lower than comparable rates among married women. This suggests that it is the presence of children younger than school age who do not have child care options that prevents many single mothers from working for pay. A telling graphic (p.43) reveals the degree of potential need for child care in Canada (numbers of children with mothers in the paid work force) in relation to the numbers of regulated child care spaces (where governments establish, monitor and enforce legal requirements)-- a quick calculation suggests that the need/supply ratio is about 5.411 for children aged 0-5. Among children aged 6-12, the ratio of need to supply is 22/1. Friendly is careful to caution the reader that need for child care and demand for it are not identical, with need being assumed if both parents are in the paid workforce, but demand being a function of other options for care and the family's values. …

Real Welfare Reform: Help for Working Parents

BARBARA BERGMANN's new book, Saving Our Children from Poverty: What the United States Can Learn from France, will be published this fall by the Russell Sage Foundation. American welfare system, dysfunctional as it currently is, takes care of a real problem: there are single mothers who cannot earn enough to support their families, given their need for child care and health care. Sooner or later, the country will have to awaken from its pipe dream. A governmentfree America will not bring on a problem-free America. For the foreseeable future there has to be a government program to help some parents with some of the expenses of raising their children. When it does wake up, the country can start to consider whether there is an alterna-

Ethnic Families, their Children with Disabilities and their Child Care Needs

Action on Disability within Ethnic Communities (ADEC) was funded by the Department of Human Services and Health, Children's Services branch, to research the needs of families who are from a non-English speaking background and have a child with a disability. Twenty-two families were interviewed about their awareness and need for child care; whether there were any cultural or linguistic barriers in accessing services, and ways services could be improved. Families interviewed were from the Melbourne metropolitan area and represented a number of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds. The main issues identified included a general lack of information about child care options. In particular, families had a poor knowledge of family day care and out of school hours care. Carers of school-aged children felt there was a need for out of school hours care, particularly over the holiday period. There was no relationship between parents who required a lot of assistance with the child with a disability and the amount of help received or the use of services according to a Spearman's correlation. Different child care options may need to be promoted more widely within ethnic communities. Some positive aspects of child care that need to be highlighted to the carers are the benefits to the child's social and intellectual development and as a form of respite care.

Ocular defects in children and adolescents with severe mental deficiency.

To assess the need for eye care in children and adolescents with severe mental deficiency, a cross-sectional study of the prevalence and causes of ocular defects amongst these individuals was conducted. Two hundred and sixty residents in a mental handicap unit were examined from January 1992 to June 1993. It was found that there was an unusually high prevalence of severe visual impairment (25%), refractive errors (24%), squint (8%) and a number of organic ocular diseases (8%). All the patients studied were non-verbal and 18% of them were deaf. Only 23 patients could walk. The results emphasize the need for establishing an efficient system to provide regular ophthalmic care for children with severe mental deficiency.

Psychopathology among children placed in family foster care

The literature on psychopathology among children in family foster care published in the last 20 years was reviewed to estimate prevalence and types of psychopathology in this population. A comprehensive computerized database was searched for the period 1974 through 1994, with emphasis on recent literature. Available evidence suggests that the prevalence of psychopathology among children in family foster care is higher than would be expected from normative data, even when this population is compared with children who have backgrounds of similar deprivation. As for the types of psychopathology in this population, the only apparent trend is the predominance of externalizing disorders, such as disruptive behavior disorders. A combination of social, psychological, and biological factors may render children in family foster care highly vulnerable to psychopathology.

The Hidden Organization of Labor: Gender, Race/Ethnicity and Child-Care Work in the Formal and Informal Economy

While extensive studies document the need for child care in the United States, little has been done to explore the organization of child-care work or its political economic context. The article explores, both empirically and theoretically, the organization of child-care work in the United States. While formal child-care centers emerged as the fastest-growing source of child care for employed parents in the last 25 years, informal arrangements continue to serve as the source of over 75% of child care for employed parents in the United States. Given the vast provision of child care in settings outside of formal markets, informal-sector economic theory appeared a potentially viable framework for elucidating the organization of child-care work. Informal-sector theory clearly assists in identifying many forms of production existing outside of the formal market economy. Even so, informal-sector theorists show a proclivity to define and analyze labor according to the norms of formal market production. Also, theories rooted in the norms of the formal market economy fail to fully analyze care-giving work, work historically performed by women outside of formal markets. In order to accurately analyze and theorize the organization of care-giving work, political economic theories must explicitly incorporate women's household and domestic labor. By so doing theories will more fully demonstrate the ways in which gender and race/ethnicity serve as the fundamental structures organizing the work of care-giving.

Household Labor and Child Care Needs among Philippine Highland Farmers

This paper explores implications of Chayanovian analysis, the New Home Economics, and anthropological household studies for understanding relationships among reproductive and productive activities in farming households. Data on labor recall, household membership, and farming practice are analyzed from households in a community in Benguet Province, Philippines. These households include some which practice traditional rice and root farming and others which plant commercial vegetable crops as well. Variation among these households demonstrates a correspondence of three-generation extended families with traditional farming practices and of active recruitment of adult labor with households practicing commercial farming. These households appear to vary in the degrees to which they commit to productive or reproductive activity, and most may actively coordinate these two endeavors through management of household membership and choices of productive strategies. I suggest that attention to the relationships among management of both childcare needs and farm production is necessary in order to develop appropriate agricultural technologies, policies, and programs for Third World countries.