Variation in Child Care Policy Across States and Impact on the Choice of Child Care

Problem/Background: High quality child care services have positive effects on children’s developmental and longer term educational outcomes and parents’ stable employment. Center based care, which involves taking care of children in a formal or established child care center, has been found to have higher quality compared to other types of care service, such as family home care and kinship care. Previous studies have focused on the impacts of receiving child care subsidies on using center based care, but rarely consider how different policy choices in child care subsidy rules make variations across states. After welfare reform, states have differed markedly in the policies they have adopted, but little is known about how selected policy rules operate and interact in actual policy environments. This study examines the influence of child care subsidies and quality regulations on working families’ choice of care arrangement among various options of child care services.

Methods: Child care policy rules among fifty states were independent variables to examine variations in policy choices across states: child care subsidy rules such as eligibility threshold, copayment rate, reimbursement rate, and incentive to high quality care and quality regulation rules such as child-teacher ratio, inspection, and training requirement were included in the model. To investigate policy impacts on the choice of center based care, children at age between 0 and 5 with working parents, who had need of non-parental care were selected as a study sample from Survey of Income and Program Participation. Dependent variables are primary care arrangement, defined as the child care service types at which children spend the greatest amount of time of all child care services they used. Child/family characteristics were controlled. A multilevel analysis was conducted to examine the policy impacts on the primary choice of care arrangements.

Results: The choice of center based care compared to all other types of care services was significantly associated with child-staff ratio, copayment rate, and tiered incentive to high quality center care. Less stringent staff to child ratios were positively associated with using center based care(β=0.18,SE=0.06). Also, there was significant association between higher copayment rates and the use of center based care(β=0.07,SE=0.02). Proving more incentives to center based care were associated with using center based care among children under the age of 6(β=0.01,SE=0.01). When investigating policy influences on specific types of care compared to counterpart, using center based care versus family home care had significant associations with child-staff ratio in center based care(β=0.24,SE=0.10), training requirements for family home care(β=-0.07, SE=0.03). The choice of family home care versus informal care such as grandparents or relative care was significantly associated with family home care capacity(β=0.04, SE=0.01) and training requirement for family home care(β=0.07,SE=0.02).

Conclusion/Implications: This study reveals that both child care subsidy policy and regulation have substantial roles in the choice of care service among working families. Given budget limitations and widening state authority, these findings support social workers in the policy area to effectively redesign child care policy to increase the use of better quality of service.