Child Care Arrangements for Children Under Five: Variation across States

ver the past decade, child care has emergedboth as an issue of public concern and a keycomponent of U.S. social policy. The largenumber of mothers with preschool childrenin the workforce has made America’s families morereliant on nonparental care and raised public aware-ness of early care and education as an issue of pub-lic policy. Many children now spend at least sometime in child care during their critical developmentalyears. As a result, child care centers, family childcare homes, relatives, and nan-nies have become essential toworking families with children.Policymakers also have recog-nized the importance of childcare because of the role it playsin helping parents work andbecause of the impact it canhave on the development ofchildren. In 1996, for example,policymakers considered childcare a key factor in helpingwelfare recipients attain self-sufficiency, and accordingly, the federal welfarereform legislation—the Personal Responsibility andWork Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA)—highlighted child care as a work support mechanism.Examining Child Care at theState LevelSignificant aspects of child care policy have his-torically fallen under the purview of state govern-ments. For example, states establish many of thechild care subsidy policies—such as reimbursementrates for child care providers and copayment rates forrecipients of child care assistance—and also regulatechild care quality. The changes to federal child carepolicy outlined by PRWORA further expanded therole of states in child care policymaking by endingthe child care entitlement for welfare recipients, con-solidating the four major federal child care assis-tance programs into a single block grant, andincreasing child care funding to states. Yet relatively little is known about child carepatterns in individual states or how they vary acrossstates. Most of what is known about the use of childcare is gathered from nationally representative sur-veys that are not designed to capture state-level childcare patterns. It is likely that large variations existacross states due to differencesin the costs and supply of childcare as well as variations inlabor force patterns and childcare policies. A better under-standing of state-specific childcare behavior will help state pol-icymakers effectively targettheir child care policies andidentify the likely impact of pol-icy changes.This brief, therefore, pro-vides information on the prima-ry child care arrangements used by children underfive with employed mothers nationally and across anumber of states. Also, because child care experi-ences tend to vary for children of different ages andincomes, we examine infants and toddlers separate-ly from three- and four-year-olds, and childrenfrom families with incomes above 200 percent ofthe federal poverty level (FPL) separately fromthose with incomes at or below 200 percent of theFPL.The National Survey of Ameri-ca’s FamiliesData from the 1997 National Survey of Ameri-ca’s Families (NSAF)1are used to examine primarychild care arrangements. The NSAF oversampledhouseholds with income below 200 percent of theTHE URBANINSTITUTESeries B, No. B-7, March 2000CHILDCAREARRANGEMENTS FORCHILDREN UNDERFIVE:VARIATIONACROSSSTATESJeffrey Capizzano, Gina Adams, andFreya SonensteinNEW FEDERALISMNational Survey of American FamiliesNEW FEDERALISMNational Survey of America’s FamiliesA product ofAssessing theNew Federalism,an Urban InstituteProgram to AssessChanging Social PoliciesOA better understanding ofstate-specific child carebehavior will help statepolicymakers effectivelytarget their child carepolicies and identify thelikely impact of policychanges. FPL and collected child care informa-tion on a nationally representativesample of children as well as on repre-sentative samples of children in 12states.2For randomly selected chil-dren in the sample households, inter-views were conducted with the personmost knowledgeable about each child.From these interviews, data were col-lected about the types of care used andthe number of hours that the childspent in each form of care.3Since themother was most often the mostknowledgeable adult, the term “moth-er” is used here to refer to this respon-dent.4This analysis focuses only onchildren under five whose motherswere interviewed during the nonsum-mer months.5We also restrict ouranalysis to preschool children whosemothers are employed.The primary child care arrange-ment is defined as the arrangement inwhich the child spends the most num-ber of hours while the mother is atwork. We group the arrangements inthe following primary arrangement cat-egories:center-based child care (childcare centers, Head Start, preschool,prekindergarten, and before-