Number B-8 in Series, "New Federalism: National Survey of America's Families"
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Note: To see data on the number of child care arrangements used by children under five from the 1999 National Survey of America's Families, click here.
A large majority of preschool children with employed mothers currently spend at least some time each week in the care of individuals who are not their parents. Fueled by increases in workforce participation among women, work requirements for single mothers receiving public assistance, and parental concerns over the "school-readiness" of preschoolers, the number of children under five in child care has increased significantly over the past three decades. In fact, in 1997, 77 percent of preschool children with employed mothers were cared for in child care centers, in family child care homes, by relatives, or by nannies for at least some time each week (Capizzano, Adams, and Sonenstein 2000). Largely because of this growing reliance on nonparental care, the topic of early childhood care and education has emerged both as an issue of public concern and a major component of U.S. social policy.
Examining Child Care at the State Level
While federal child care policy has received national attention in recent years, states and localities have historically been at the center of child care policymaking. States, for example, establish many of the child care subsidy policies—such as reimbursement rates for child care providers and copayment rates for recipients of child care assistance—and also regulate child care quality. In 1996, changes to federal child care policy outlined in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) brought increased attention to the role of states in child care policymaking. For example, PRWORA enhanced the role of state policymakers by ending the child care entitlement for welfare recipients, combining a number of diverse child care funding streams into a single block grant, and increasing child care funding to states.
In light of these changes to federal policy, understanding state-level patterns of child care use has taken on added significance. Yet relatively little is known about child care patterns in individual states or how they vary across states because most of what we know about the use of child care is gathered from nationally representative surveys that are not designed to capture state-level child care patterns. The significant variation that exists in child care usage across states is most likely due to such differences as labor force patterns, child care costs and supply, and child care policies. A better understanding of state-level patterns of care will provide state policymakers with additional information when forming child care policy and will assist them in identifying the likely impact of policy changes.
The focus here is on an aspect of child care that is important to state policymakers: the number of hours that children spend in care each week. Research has found that the hours spent in care, especially when combined with such factors as family characteristics and the quality of care used, can affect a child's social and cognitive development (NICHD Early Childhood Research Network 1998).
This brief examines the number of hours that preschool children with employed mothers spent in child care in 1997, how the number of hours spent in care varied across selected states, and how the amount of time in care differed across states for children of different age and income groups. We begin by looking at national and state estimates of the hours that children under five with employed mothers spent in care, and we then proceed to focus specifically on how these patterns vary for children whose mothers are employed full-time, children of different ages (infants and toddlers contrasted with three- and four-year-olds), and children from higher- and low-income families.
The National Survey of America's Families
Data from the 1997 National Survey of America's Families (NSAF) are used to determine the hours that preschool children spend in care each week. The NSAF oversampled households with income below 200 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL) and collected child care information on a nationally representative sample of children as well as on representative samples of children in 12 states. For randomly selected children in the sample households, interviews were conducted with the person most knowledgeable about each child. From these interviews, data were collected about the types of care used and the number of hours that the child spent in each form of care. Since the mother was most often the most knowledgeable adult, the term "mother" is used here to refer to this respondent. For this analysis we focus only on children under five whose mothers were interviewed during the nonsummer months. We also restrict our analysis to preschool children whose mothers were employed.
For this analysis, the hours that each child spent in care across all reported nonparental arrangements were totaled and the child was then placed in one of four categories: "full-time care" (35 or more hours per week), "part-time care" (15 to 34 hours per week), "minimal care" (1 to 14 hours per week), and "no hours in child care" (no regular hours in a nonparental child care arrangement).
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