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Child care costs are of great concern for many families in Canada, yet little is known about net child care costs. Using six "typical" families in ten cities and factoring in tax assistance and means-tested child care subsidies, we find that net child care costs vary significantly across the income distribution and family types. For many families, the combination of subsidies and tax-based supports results in significant cost reductions. However, these measures have limitations. For example, maximum subsidies do not always cover the full cost of care, and tax-based supports may not always alleviate cash flow problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: A child's long-term illness or disability is always a serious matter that impacts the whole family. Costs related to an illness can substantially affect a family's financial situation. To date, there is little research on how parents experience available support for financial assistance. Surveys in Finland have found that families of children with long-term illnesses and disabilities could experience financial struggle and perceive the state provided financial support system as too complex. This article aimed to explore how caregivers of children with long-term illnesses perceived their financial situation, need for financial support and experienced its provision by the state in the Helsinki greater region.Methods: Convenience sampling was used. Participants were contacted through peer-support groups on Facebook. Eleven mothers of children with varying long-term illnesses and disabilities residing in the Helsinki greater region were interviewed using in-depth interviews. Recordings of the interviews were transcribed and analysed using framework analysis. An analytical framework was built to label the dataset, which was then charted. Lastly, themes were formed through descriptive analysis.Results: The main findings showed how the burden of caring for a child with a long-term illness or disability causes fatigue, which affects a family's financial situation holistically. This affected both employment and financial management, but also receiving information about and applying for the state provided allowances. Mental resources were further depleted by seeking information and applying for allowances. This contributed to a vicious cycle between parental fatigue and financial struggle. Participants found the allocation of funds inequitable across the country. Finally, participants thought the allowance was insufficient in compensating for time spent caring for their child's illness and did not consider their mental strain.Conclusions: Even in a welfare state such as Finland, caregivers of children with long-term illnesses are at risk of poverty and struggle with the organization of state provided financial support. Policies should be designed to ensure equity across the country and consider how the parental fatigue should be addressed. The study has implications for achieving sustainable development goals on wellbeing and reducing poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: School closures have been enacted as a measure of mitigation during the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. It has been shown that school closures could cause absenteeism among healthcare workers with dependent children, but there remains a need for spatially granular analyses of the relationship between school closures and healthcare worker absenteeism to inform local community preparedness.Methods: We provide national- and county-level simulations of school closures and unmet child care needs across the USA. We develop individual simulations using county-level demographic and occupational data, and model school closure effectiveness with age-structured compartmental models. We perform multivariate quasi-Poisson ecological regressions to find associations between unmet child care needs and COVID-19 vulnerability factors.Results: At the national level, we estimate the projected rate of unmet child care needs for healthcare worker households to range from 7.4 to 8.7%, and the effectiveness of school closures as a 7.6% and 8.4% reduction in fewer hospital and intensive care unit (ICU) beds, respectively, at peak demand when varying across initial reproduction number estimates by state. At the county level, we find substantial variations of projected unmet child care needs and school closure effects, 9.5% (interquartile range (IQR) 8.2-10.9%) of healthcare worker households and 5.2% (IQR 4.1-6.5%) and 6.8% (IQR 4.8-8.8%) reduction in fewer hospital and ICU beds, respectively, at peak demand. We find significant positive associations between estimated levels of unmet child care needs and diabetes prevalence, county rurality, and race (p<0.05). We estimate costs of absenteeism and child care and observe from our models that an estimated 76.3 to 96.8% of counties would find it less expensive to provide child care to all healthcare workers with children than to bear the costs of healthcare worker absenteeism during school closures.Conclusions: School closures are projected to reduce peak ICU and hospital demand, but could disrupt healthcare systems through absenteeism, especially in counties that are already particularly vulnerable to COVID-19. Child care subsidies could help circumvent the ostensible trade-off between school closures and healthcare worker absenteeism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1997, the government of Québec instituted a low‐cost and universal childcare services program most commonly available through the "centres de la petite enfance (CPE)" (early chilldhood centers). Since 2003, this model is being slowly dismantled on account of an explosion in the number of commercial daycare centers and, since 2015, an adjustment of rates according to family revenues. This research article gathers scattered information about the childcare services offer changes in Québec to demonstrate that tearing down a section of the Québécois family policy lowers the collectivization of social reproductive work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the cost of child care in the U.S. has increased substantially over the past few decades. This paper marshals data from a variety of sources to rigorously assess the issue. It begins by using a large survey dataset to trace the evolution in families’ child care expenditures. I find that the typical family currently spends 14 percent more on child care than it did in 1990. This is less than half the increase documented in previous work. In addition, most families allocate approximately the same share of income to child care as they did several decades ago. The next section of the paper examines the trend in the market price of child care. The evidence suggests that after persistent, albeit modest, growth throughout the 1990s, market prices have been essentially flat for at least a decade. In the paper's final section, I analyze several features of the child care market that may have implications for prices, including the demand for child care, the skill-level of the child care workforce, and state regulations. A few findings are noteworthy. First, I show that child care demand stagnated around the same time that market prices leveled-off. Second, although the skill-level of the child care workforce increased in absolute terms, highly-educated women increasingly find child care employment less attractive than other occupations. Finally, child care regulations have not systematically increased in stringency, and they appear to have small and inconsistent effects on market prices. Together, these results indicate that the production of child care has not become more costly, which may explain the recent stagnation in market prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the proposed tax benefits related to child care for the low-income families and working class by the U.S. President Donald Trump. Topics mentioned include the importance of subsidized child care and paid family leave to improve health and well-being of the families, to build time and resources for caring the families to promote high-quality child care as a long-term investment for economic growth and to provide income and job security for mothers and children from poverty wherein child care costs have increased.

In this research paper, we consider the extent to which families who incur child care expenses for their young children are pushed below the poverty threshold by those costs using a supplemental poverty measure (SPM) framework. We use Current Population Survey data to determine poverty rates among families with young children who incur child care costs. We then subtract their out of pocket child care from their income to estimate the poverty rate among these families when child care is considered. Our findings suggest that one third of the poverty experienced by these families is a result of child care expenses. Families most often pushed into poverty by child care expenses include households with three or more children, those headed by a single parent, those with a black or Hispanic head of household, and those headed by someone with less than a high school degree or by someone who does not work full time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Baltic and Nordic countries share historical and political connections as well as geographical proximity. Nevertheless, when their welfare regimes are compared, Baltic countries can be included in a post-communist model that differs from the social-democratic model of Nordic countries in many respects. This article focuses on one of these aspects, the opinion expressed towards the financial responsibility for the care of children and the elderly. In particular, childcare policies have been used to explain the development of a dual earner/dual career model in Nordic countries. Nevertheless, full-time employment of women is widespread in Baltic countries too, although family policies and attitudes strongly differ from Nordic ones. Using data from the International Social Survey Programme (2012), we compare public attitudes towards who should cover the costs of caring in five Nordic countries (Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Denmark) and two Baltic ones (Latvia and Lithuania). We find remarkable differences between both groups of nations: citizens from Baltic countries consider the role of the family more important than their counterparts in Nordic countries. Results show Latvians holding the most familistic views in terms of covering costs, and Swedish people the least. Individual socio-demographic variables are less important than national contexts in explaining these attitudes. We find important variations among the social-democratic countries and, surprisingly, in the case of childcare, Sweden shows higher differences to Denmark than to Latvia and Lithuania. This finding suggests that the social-democratic bloc in this respect is more heterogeneous than what is generally thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) provides cash reimbursement to family day care, child-care centers, homeless shelters, and afterschool programs for meals and snacks served to children. Despite young children's known vulnerability to fluctuations in nutritional intake, prior literature has largely neglected the contributions of the CACFP to reducing household food insecurity. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), we examine the association between CACFP provider participation and food insecurity, controlling for the nonrandom selection process into child-care centers that participate in CACFP. We find that accessing child care through providers that participate in the CACFP results in a small reduction in the risk of household food insecurity. Given the known cognitive and health consequences associated with food insecurity during early childhood, our results indicate the importance of improving access to the CACFP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many low-income families receive child-care subsidies, and a small but growing literature examines the relationship between subsidies and family well-being. Some studies find a negative association between subsidy receipt and family wellbeing, raising questions about the processes that mediate the two. Drawing on a subsample of 1,189 subsidy recipients and eligible mothers from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we investigate the relationship between child-care subsidies and maternal and child well-being using measures of parenting stress, maternal depression, and child cognitive and behavioral outcomes. Within a sample limited to working mothers, and after addressing issues of selection, we find little evidence to suggest relationships between subsidy receipt and maternal and child well-being, despite significant negative bivariate associations between subsidy receipt and measures of well-being. Null findings are consistent with those of other recent studies and suggest that subsidy receipt in and of itself is not associated with decreased wellbeing of either children or mothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Childcare has become a recent focus of government intervention. Concerns have been raised about the soaring costs for parents, patchy provision, and the often small and unprofitable nature of the services themselves. This paper will explore how the problem of sustainability in the childcare sector is being addressed through a neoliberal development rationale. Focusing on the Irish childcare sector and the childcare funding programme introduced in 2006,1 will illustrate how a particular entrepreneurial subjectivity has been mobilised to remedy the perceived problems of private sector childcare. I refer to this subjectivity as the 'caring entrepreneur'. After I outline the contours of this subjectivity, the final section of the paper will examine how it is being realised within a rural childcare market, in the process offering a more situated account of what 'sustainability' means in place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potential human and financial costs of foster placement disruption for the children, families, professionals and agencies involved are widely accepted. This service evaluation identified and described perspectives of foster parents and social workers regarding placement disruptions in order to identify the main issues of concern and to derive lessons to inform practice. Postal questionnaires containing both quantitative and qualitative questions were sent to supervising social workers, field social workers and foster parents involved in the 36 non-kinship foster placement disruptions that occurred from 1 January 2009 to 31 December 2011 in one Health and Social Care Trust in Northern Ireland. In total, 107 questionnaires were sent out and the overall response rate was 62%. Multiple factors were involved in the disruptions, with the child's behaviour and contact with birth family being the greatest concerns, followed by attachment issues. Disruptions were more prevalent for adolescent placements, placements of less than one year duration and “new” foster parents. Views on communication between professionals and foster parents were generally encouraging. In the majority of cases the disruption was thought likely to have occurred even if any additional supports that could be envisaged could have been provided. Recommendations for practice include enhanced supervision and support for new foster parents, activity to value foster parents, the recording of disruption data, and development of a behaviour management training plan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For many families, child care is a necessity for economic self-sufficiency, as without it caretakers cannot enter and stay in the workforce. However, for many low-income families, child care expenses are so high that they often cannot afford it without government support. Also problematic is that government-supported child care benefits are incrementally lost as a family’s income increases, but often before sufficient income can be sustained to replace that support. This is known as the child care cliff. The focus of this study was to understand how families make decisions about child care and government support when facing this cliff. This article details a mixed-methods study that revealed that families use a combination of resources to make up their income package that they need to manage everyday survival, including government benefits, wages, and social supports. Also, though the cliff effect is a significant barrier to moving from government supports to self-sufficiency, there are multiple other barriers that add to the very real reasons that families have to carefully strategize to survive. The most helpful things for families in strategizing were a flexible job and solid social support networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of programmatic childcare since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of early 2009, as well as the increasing diversity of childcare recipients, call urgently for novel insight into the morphology of the childcare sector. This paper attempts such elucidation, focusing especially on the structure, accessibility, delivery methods, and policies that affect the sector's various programs. The authors assert that childcare is a public right rather than an elite privilege, and that quality programs should therefore be available to parents at a reasonable cost. So far, this remains an American dream yet to be realized. For far too many families, attaining high quality childcare requires trekking a path riddled with difficult terrain. The authors contend that the burden of navigating such obstacles would subside with a restructuring of the current childcare sector. Issues to be addressed include the following: (a) the coexistence of public, private, and non-profit agencies in the childcare industry; (b) the operation of legal and non-legal services within the same market segment; (c) diversity of the work force and resulting instability; (d) various governmental provisions such as grants and loans; e) preferences of ethnic clientele. Taking these essential factors into consideration, the authors argue that the childcare sector requires a public-private joint venture in which the necessary financial and human resources are pooled together to reach the common goal-that is, to provide every family equal access to quality childcare, which is not only crucial to our country's foundation, but also a fundamental human right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to explain why people differ in their attitudes towards public childcare, we present a theoretical framework that integrates four causal mechanisms: regime socialisation, political ideology, family involvement and material self-interest. Estimation results obtained from multivariate regressions on the 2002 German General Social Survey and replications on the 2008/9 European Social Survey can be condensed into three statements: (1) Regime socialisation is the single most important determinant of attitudes toward public childcare, followed by young age as an indicator of self-interest and political ideology. Family involvement does not have any sizeable impact. (2) Regime socialisation conditions the impact of some indicators of political ideology and family involvement on attitudes toward public childcare. (3) Despite a paradigmatic shift in policy, the dynamics of 2008 mirror those of 2002, highlighting the stability of inter-individual differences in support. The results suggest that the ‘shadow of communism’ still stretches over what people in the East expect from the welfare state and that individual difference in the demand for public childcare appears to be highly path-dependent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between welfare reform and child care costs among low-income single mothers and the effects of post reform child care subsidy receipt on the status and duration of these mothers'' employment. A two-step model analysis of data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (1993, 1996, and 2001 panels) revealed marginal effects of welfare reform on child care costs, indicating that child care costs increased significantly among low-income single mothers after welfare reform. Results from a Tobit model revealed that child care subsidy receipt also had significant effects on employment status. Finally, families with only a mother and children in the household had a higher probability of using paid child care and spent more on care than mothers with other adults in the household. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article offers information on the Universal Credit policy and its effects on single parents in Great Britain. It mentions that the program aims to simplify the welfare system and its level of support to childcare. It features the quality of childcare programs of the government and the assistance given to working parents.

Abstract: Although employer-sponsored child care programs have become more common, there is little empirical research on whether these programs affect employees’ satisfaction with child care or their work-life balance, and if effects vary across employee characteristics. In this exploratory study, we administered a survey to employees with children at one large university to gather information on their child care arrangements and experience with their employer''s child care voucher program (N =776). Satisfaction with child care varied with employee and child care characteristics, but not with voucher receipt. Families with preschool children, White families, and those using paid home-based care were more satisfied with their child care arrangements than those with school-age children, minority families, and those using center-based or before/afterschool care. Nearly half of voucher recipients (47%) reported benefits in work-life balance as a result of the voucher. Although demand-side vouchers appear to be a promising employer approach to address child care challenges, these results suggest that attention must also be given to the structure of child care supply as satisfaction and work-family stress are affected by more factors than child care cost only. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article presents the author's insights on the aid of accounting for child care as a support for workers in the U.S. The author is critical on the interaction between the gendered division of labor such as sex segregation and the priorities of public policy inside the labor market. He highlights the issue of money and child care among low-income parents especially single mothers and women of color. He relates two pathologies in contemporary antipoverty policy such as failure to value parental caregiving as work and inadequate child-care assistance. Moreover, he analyzes how child-care invisibility works within the component of an antipoverty policy.

While it does not cost a great deal to make a difference in the life of a child living in poverty, that does not mean that they are cheap to care for. To avoid confusion there is a need to distinguish between expenditures on care, marginal costs of care and total cost of care. Expenditures on children are the amounts of money spent on their care. The marginal cost of care is the cost of achieving a specific increase in the level of care. The total cost of care is the cost of providing a given level of care. While much can be said about differences in expenditures and marginal costs, little can be said about differences in total costs. Clearly, expenditures are far greater among the rich, while the marginal impact of additional spending is far greater among the poor. Total costs of care, however, cannot be compared easily because the care itself is not comparable. To compare care requires a definition of care. This article focuses upon this issue and points to the limitations inherent in conceptualizing aspects of care as cumulative rather than interactive. The focus on the interactive nature of care highlights the importance of the care environment. As most children live in families and communities, the strengths, resources and capacities of these care environments and their interactive nature is similarly highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family, friend, and neighbor (FFN) caregivers play important roles in delivering subsidized noncustodial child care. Yet, little is known about these noncustodial caregivers. This article profiles the caregiving experiences, motivations, and resource needs of these providers, based on a survey of 301 randomly selected FFN providers in one state. Recommendations are offered for strengthening public supports to enhance the quality of this form of caregiving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impact of the introduction of market forces on child care provision in the Netherlands. In January 2005, the Dutch government introduced the Child Care Act, replacing the former financing system, which had elements of both supply- and demand-financing, with a fully demand-financing system. As a result, the provision of child care is now driven by market forces. Using data on the geographical location of child care facilities, this article compares the factors affecting the provision of child care in the Netherlands before and after the introduction of the Child Care Act. The results suggest that after the regulatory reform the provision of child care has shifted towards wealthy urbanised areas, characterised by high demand and high purchasing power. This shift has largely benefited for-profit providers particularly active in these markets. In parallel, the results indicate an important drop in child care provision by non-profit organisations, most pronounced in less wealthy rural areas. These findings suggest that the introduction of demand-financing may have implications for the accessibility of child care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the fragmented structure of child-care assistance in the United States, it has been difficult to obtain accurate estimates of which families are assisted, through which mechanisms, and at what level. Making use of survey data from New York City, we analyze the distribution of several forms of public child-care assistance. Results suggest that about 40% of all families with young children receive some form of child-care assistance. Considering all forms of assistance, the distribution of child-care help is targeted in both expected and some unexpected ways. Implications of these results are discussed in the context of U.S. child-care policies governing access and benefit levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young children with disabilities are significantly more likely to live in poverty than their peers without disabilities. Exposure to poverty creates additional risk of adverse outcomes for these vulnerable children. In this article, the following key circumstances contributing to this increased risk of impoverishment are analyzed: elevated costs of raising children with disabilities, low levels of public income transfer benefits, difficulty balancing parental employment and caregiving responsibilities, unavailable or high-cost child care, and inadequate leave time to permit parents to meet their children's episodic care needs. The implications of these issues for social work practice and advocacy needs are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist policy makers need accurate measures of inequality in the economic well-being of men and women. In this paper, we explain why the wage gap by gender gives a misleading measure of women's relative economic well-being in the United States, emphasizing the effects of income pooling within households. We construct a household-level index of women's “spendable” income relative to men's that builds on Randy Albelda's (1988) “PAR index.” We improve on the PAR index in three ways. First, we account for economies of scale associated with additional household members. Second, we utilize the Current Population Survey to capture the impact of government taxes and transfers, providing an indicator of “spendable,” rather than “money” income. Finally, as a step toward redefining the concept of “spendable” income, we deduct a lower-bound estimate of child care costs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public financing of privately provided child care can allow for access to these services in places where public provision and capacity are low. However, the mechanisms of subsidy delivery will affect who benefits, and the overall cost-effectiveness of such subsidies. This paper sets out an ex-ante simulation model for estimating the benefit incidence of expanded capacity and enrollments resulting from different child care subsidy mechanisms. It combines a supply-side provider level and a demand-side household model in one simulation. The paper considers investment  vs. operational monthly grants to child care providers, combinations of investment and operational grants, and demand-side vouchers to households. The model is applied to empirical data from child care centers and households in Turkey. The results reveal that the choice of the subsidy delivery model has a strong bearing on the benefit incidence and cost-effectiveness of the subsidy. In the case of Turkey, where significant supply-side constraints exist in the market, a demand-side voucher system is shown to be the least cost-effective subsidy delivery model. A targeted demand-side voucher does not necessarily deliver the most “pro-poor results,” and combinations show different benefits and costs. The proposed simulation model can be applied in other country contexts, with the only data requirements being microdata on the costs and pricing structure of child care providers, as well as household data with variables on household welfare and child care utilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]