Multiple child care arrangements and young children's development /

Multiple child care arrangements and young children's development /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Pilarz, Alejandra Ros, author.
Imprint:	2015. Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2015
Description:	1 electronic resource (331 pages)
Language:	English
Format:	E-Resource Dissertations
Local Note:	School code: 0330
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/10773081

Hidden Bibliographic Details
Other authors / contributors:	University of Chicago. degree granting institution.
ISBN:	9781321882230
Notes:	Advisors: Julia R. Henly Committee members: Rachel A. Gordon; Heather D. Hill. This item is not available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses. This item must not be sold to any third party vendors. This item must not be added to any third party search indexes. Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 76-11(E), Section: A. English
Summary:	With rising rates of maternal labor force participation in recent decades and an increasingly work-based safety net, managing work and caregiving needs is a key challenge for working parents. To fulfill their caregiving needs in the face of various family, employment, and child care market constraints, parents may need to rely on multiple child care providers. In 2011, 18 percent of children younger than age 5 were in two or more regular, concurrent arrangements (Laughlin, 2013), and many more experience multiple arrangements at some point in early childhood. Despite this, little is known about the reasons parents use multiple arrangements or the relationship between multiple arrangements and young children's development. Whereas some parents may use multiple arrangements in order to expose their child to particular type(s) and amounts of preferred care, others may rely on them out of necessity, due to employment or child care market constraints. These different reasons for using multiple arrangements may in turn have different implications for children's development. The purpose of this dissertation is to improve our understanding of the determinants of and effects on young children's development of multiple, concurrent arrangements. The dissertation is organized around three empirical chapters, all of which use data from a nationally-representative and longitudinal, birth cohort study of children born in the U.S. in 2001--the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS-B). In the first chapter, I examine how families' child care needs and resources, parental child care priorities, and the child care market context relate to the use of multiple arrangements and whether these relationships vary by child age and the type(s) of care used. The findings suggest that both parental child care preferences and various family, employment, and child care market constraints contribute to parents' decisions about the number and types of arrangements to use for their young children. I also find evidence that the determinants of multiple arrangements vary by child age, suggesting that parents' reasons for using multiple arrangements change over time as children grow older. In the second chapter, I focus specifically on how the generosity of states' child care subsidy programs relates to the use of multiple arrangements in order to examine whether child care subsidies may influence parents' decisions about the number of arrangements and the extent to which cost constraints play a role in low-income families' use of multiple arrangements. I find that state-level subsidy program spending is positively associated with higher odds of using a single center-based arrangement relative to multiple arrangements, particularly multiple home-based arrangements, suggesting that the high cost of center-based care is prohibitive for low-income families and that some families may rely on multiple, informal caregivers as a result. The third chapter examines the cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships between multiple arrangements and children's developmental outcomes across early childhood, as well as family-level and child care-level moderators of these relationships, in order to determine how and under what conditions multiple arrangements matter for children's development. I find no evidence that the number of arrangements in and of itself is related to child outcomes at any age. Instead, I find that these relationships depend on the type(s) of care used, suggesting that developmentally-appropriate combinations of multiple care arrangements are not associated with adverse outcomes and may in some cases be associated with more positive cognitive and socioemotional outcomes than using a single arrangement. Together, the three studies contribute a more nuanced understanding of parents' reasons for using multiple arrangements and their potential consequences for children's development. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for future research, social work, and public policy.