Parents’ Reasons for Searching for Child Care and Early Education: Findings from the 2019 National Survey of Early Care and Education

Several considerations factor into parents’ search for and selection of CCEE for their children. Parents may consider their income, work or schooling schedules, cultural beliefs, CCEE preferences, and local supply of CCEE. Understanding the reasons why households search for and make decisions about CCEE, and how those reasons may vary across households, can help inform efforts to promote equitable access to CCEE. 

Just over one-third of households that reported on a child under age 6 searched for CCEE in the two years prior to the 2019 NSECE. 

• Households with higher incomes (>=200% FPL) searched for CCEE at a significantly higher rate than households with lower incomes (<200% FPL).
• Households in which the child was Hispanic or Latino had lower CCEE search rates than households in which the child was Non-Hispanic or Latino (NH) White, NH Black or African American, or NH Asian or Asian American.
• Households in which the child was NH multiracial had higher CCEE search rates than households in which the child was NH White and NH American Indian or Alaska Native.

Meeting parents’ needs and supporting child’s development were the two most common reasons parents reported searching for CCEE in the two years prior to the 2019 NSECE. 

• Searching for CCEE to meet parents’ needs was especially common among parents that searched for CCEE for infants and toddlers, as well as parents with lower household incomes. 
• Supporting child’s development was a more common reason among parents that searched for CCEE for a preschool-aged child, as well as parents with higher household incomes. 
• Households that searched for CCEE for a NH Asian or Asian American child were more likely to cite supporting child’s development and less likely to cite meeting parents’ needs as their reason for search compared to households in which the child was NH White, NH Black or African American, NH multiracial, or Hispanic or Latino.

More than half of households that searched for CCEE changed their care arrangement following their search.

• Households with higher incomes were more likely to change their care than those with lower incomes. 

The most common reasons parents did not enroll with a new provider were related to affordability and reasonable effort.

• There were no significant differences in the reasons parents did not enroll with a new provider by household income, child age, or the race and ethnicity of the selected child.

To capture households’ CCEE needs, preferences, and choices, the 2019 NSECE HH Survey includes information on a randomly selected child living in each household. The data in this snapshot represent the 16,372,451 households that reported on a selected child under age 6 (i.e., 0 to <72 months, not yet in kindergarten), with a special focus on the 5,950,051 households that conducted a CCEE search for that child in the 24 months prior to survey administration.[1] We used Wald’s tests to examine how the reasons for search, rates of change in CCEE, and reasons for not changing CCEE varied by household characteristics (i.e., household income, age of selected child, and race and ethnicity of the selected child) where sample sizes allowed. We did not conduct comparisons tests on samples that were suppressed or flagged for cautious interpretation. To lower the probability of falsely identifying significant differences among many comparisons, we adjusted for multiple comparisons using the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure[2] with a false discovery rate (FDR) of 0.10.