Infant Care Arrangements and Maternal Well Being among Low-Income Non-Migrant Families and Migrant Farm Working Families

As parents rely on an increasingly complex patchwork of care giving arrangements, one aspect of children's early care experiences that may be associated with both children's and parent's well being is the complexity of the child care arrangements. Participants in a low-income sample and in a migrant farm working family sample participated in home-based interviews. Participants in the sample of low-income mothers included 85 mothers of infants who ranged in age from 3 to 20 months (mean = 11.4 months, sd = 5). Participants in the migrant farm working sample included 83 mothers of infants age one to eighteen months (mean = 9.8 months, sd = 4.2). For the low-income sample, maternal depression was significantly predicted from a greater number of child-care arrangements, greater transportation difficulties to the child-care arrangements, and lower ratings of the quality of the child-care, even when household income and child characteristics were controlled. For the mothers from migrant farm working families, however, there were no significant associations between maternal depression and these variables. (Contains 14 tables.)