Chapter Two: Who Cares for Children in Low-Income Families

In this chapter we consider the universe of all low-income families and describe their most basic child care decisions. For this study, the population of low-income families was defined operationally as those with annual incomes below 200 percent of the FPL that contain at least one child under the age of 13. Children in these households require adult supervision. What are the options available to families?

The first option is to ensure that children are cared for by one or the other parent. There are a variety of ways in which this might happen. First, the mother may not be employed outside the home,10 and thus may be always available as a caregiver. (She may still work, however; for example, many family day care providers are themselves mothers of young children, and thus combine care of their own children with an income-producing activity.) Some mothers, e.g., housekeepers, may take their children to work with them. The mother may work outside the home, but may restrict these activities to times when her children are in school (working “mothers’ hours”). Finally, she may coordinate her work hours with those of the children’s father so that care is always provided by one or the other parent. A second option, if the children are at the older end of the age spectrum, is to have them care for themselves when not in school. As a third option, children may receive some form of non-parental child care: care by a relative in the child’s own home or in the relative’s home; care by an unrelated adult in the child’s home; care by an unrelated adult in a family child care home; or non-relative care in a day care center, preschool program, after- school program, or other nonresidential setting.

Families’ child care choices are interwoven with their choices about the mother’s employment –whether she works, how far from home, how many hours per week, a fixed versus a variable schedule–and potentially with other choices such as car ownership and household composition. Families make all sorts of combinations of work and child care arrangements, and a change in any aspect of one could trigger a change in the other. Unreliable non-parental child care may cause a woman to lose her job; and conversely, loss of a job can cause a woman to take her child out of non-parental care.

The data for this chapter come from the Screening Questionnaire for the Community Survey. The analysis sample comprises 6,160 low-income families with children under age 13. Below, we summarize the findings from this portion of the survey. A discussion of analytic issues and a more detailed description of the results of the analysis follow the summary.

Summary of Findings

• Just over 60 percent of children under age 13 in low-income families had mothers who were working or in school for more than 20 hours a week.

• Almost half (44 percent) of children under age 13 in low-income families were in some form of non-parental child care; most of the rest, (40 percent) had mothers who were not working or in school, and the remainder had another care arrangement (mother worked at home, mother worked only when the child is in school, other parent cared for child or child cared for self).

• Infants and school-aged children were less likely to be in non-parental care than toddlers and preschoolers: infants because their mothers were less likely to be working, and school-age children because their mothers worked during school hours.

• The more children under 13 there were in a family, the less likely it was that the mother worked or, if she did work, the less likely she was to use non-parental care for her children.

• Black11 mothers in low-income families were much more likely to be working and to use non-parental care than White or Hispanic mothers in low-income families.

Analytic Considerations

Although we have consistent information on child care arrangements for only one (randomly selected) child per family, and we cannot assume that it applies to all children in the family,12 the information can be generalized to the population of all children by taking account of the numbers and ages of the other children in each family. To determine, for example, the proportion of all low-income children under age 13 that are in families with nonworking mothers, the sample of randomly selected children has been reweighted to match the known distribution of all children under 13 in the same set of families with respect to both family size (number of children under 13) and age of selected child.

For most of the analyses reported below, however, the unit of analysis is the family. This is the appropriate unit when asking broad questions about the use of non-parental care, such as:

• In what proportion of low-income families does the mother not work? How does this proportion vary by family ethnicity, number of children in the family, and age of youngest child?

• In what proportion of low-income families does the mother use some form of non-parental care? How does this proportion vary by family ethnicity, number of children in the family, and age of youngest child?

The use of “some form of non-parental care” is necessarily defined as a family-level variable, without reference to the individual children. Of the families with working mothers in which the first selected child was in parental care, just over 10 percent used non-parental care for at least one other child. At the family level, a meaningful categorization is:

• Mother does not work;

• Mother works, but family does not use any non-parental care;

• Family uses some non-parental care.

For families within the second grouping, a variety of arrangements may be used for the different children–for example, some children may be in school while younger children are in the care of their father or their mother (working at home). Similarly, families within the third grouping may be using a variety of parental and non-parental forms of care. Hence we cannot define the family-level variable any more finely with respect to mode of care.

In the sections that follow, we first examine the care arrangements for individual children, relative to the age of the child. We then show how patterns of child care use vary by number of children potentially needing care and by family ethnicity.

Child Care Arrangements by Age of Child

Of all children under age 13 in low-income families, 56 percent were cared for only by a parent. This total comprises: 40 percent whose mothers did not work; 3 percent whose mothers worked at home; 7 percent who were cared for by their father while their mother worked; 5 percent who were in school when their mother worked, and required no additional care; and 1 percent who cared for themselves after school (Exhibit 2.1).

The remaining 44 percent of children received some non-parental care. They comprise: 20 percent who were looked after by a relative; 6 percent who were in family child care with a non-relative; 3 percent who were cared for by an unrelated adult in their own home, and 15 percent who received care in a child care center, preschool or after-school program. A detailed discussion of the use of non-parental child care appears in Chapter Four. For the remainder of this chapter, we group all non-parental child care modes together and look at the family as a whole.

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The use of non-parental care differed somewhat by the age of the child, with younger children being more likely to have a nonworking mother. Almost half of all children under the age of one had a stay-at-home mother; 40 percent had nonworking mothers, and an additional 3 percent had mothers who worked at home (Exhibit 2.2). Another 7 percent were cared for by their fathers while their mothers worked, while forty-six percent of children under one were in non-parental care.

Older children were more likely to have a working mother, with the proportion of nonworking mothers declining from 44 percent for infants to 38 percent for school-age children. The proportion of stay-at-home mothers with young children in this low-income population was similar to the proportion found in surveys of the general population. The 1995 SIPP found that almost 43 percent of children under age 5 were in families in which mothers were not working outside the home or attending school (Smith, 2000). In our survey, school-age children were less likely than any of the younger groups to be in non-parental care, because their mothers could work while they were in school (7 percent). Also, in a few cases (2 percent), the children cared for themselves after school.

Exhibit 2.3 presents the proportions of families with employed mothers that used parental versus non-parental care, for children of different ages. The overwhelming majority of families with children under 6 years of age (82%-86%) used non-parental care as their primary care arrangement. The proportion of families that used parental care or self-care rose to more than one-third (34%) for school-age children, since one or the other parent may have been able to provide care for the hours before or after school,13 or the child might have been considered old enough to be at home unsupervised.

Ethnicity, Number of Children, and Use of Non-Parental Care in Low-Income Families

Blacks and Hispanics were more heavily represented in the population of low-income families with children than they are in the population as a whole. In the survey sample, about a third (34 percent) of low-income families with children were Hispanic, 20 percent are Black, just under 8 percent were Asian, Pacific Islander or multi-racial, and the remaining 38 percent were White.

Three-quarters of families (75 percent) had only one or two children under age 13. Households with four or more children comprised 8 percent of the total.

Use of non-parental care varied both by ethnicity and by number of children in the household. These two family characteristics were somewhat related, as White families tended to have fewer children under age 13 than either Hispanic or non-Hispanic Black families. Families with three or more children constituted 21 percent of White families, compared with 27 percent of families in each of the other two groups (Exhibit 2.4).

Not surprisingly, mothers with fewer children were more likely to work (Exhibit 2.5). The prevalence of nonworking mothers increased from almost a third (32 percent) among families with only one child, to more than half (52 percent) among families with four or more children. Families with more children are likely to find it difficult to make informal care arrangements with relatives and, without the aid of a subsidy for child care, may find the cost of child care matches or exceeds what they can earn.

Even when mothers worked, those with a single child were more likely to be able to arrange care by the other parent or work only when the child is in school (19 percent) than mothers with more children (e.g., 6.4% for mothers with four or more children). The use of non-parental care was about the same (48 to 50 percent) for families with one, two or three children, but declined for families with four or more children.

Ethnic differences in mother’s employment and use of non-parental care were striking and cannot be explained by ethnic differences in family size (Exhibit 2.6). Black families were much less likely to have a nonworking mother than either White or Hispanic families (22 percent versus 39 and 42 percent) and much more likely to use non-parental care (65 percent versus 44 and 42 percent).