Early Care and Education Funding and Mothers' Time with Children

Background and Purpose: Publicly-funded early care and education (ECE) programs increase children in low-income families’ participation in center-based ECE. This is true even among children whose mothers work nonstandard schedules, even though center-based ECE programs are typically only open weekday, daytime hours. Children’s time in center-based ECE often does not fully overlap with parental work hours, suggesting parents are motivated to enroll children for the developmental benefits rather than solely for a work support. This decoupling of center-based ECE time from parental work time raises questions about its implications for parent-child time and family wellbeing. This study asks how publicly-funded ECE programs—child-care subsidy, Head Start, and state pre-kindergarten (pre-k) programs—are associated with the amount of time that mothers spend with their young children and whether these associations vary by mothers’ work schedules.

Methods: I use time-diary data from the 2003-2019 American Time Use Survey. The sample includes mothers with low incomes whose youngest child was 0-4 years old (N=6,138). I examine two aspects of mothers’ time with children: active child-care time when the mother was engaged with their child (126 minutes per day) and developmental child-care time when the mother was engaged in educational activities with their child (44 minutes per day). I regress each outcome on state-level spending on each ECE program (child-care subsidies, Head Start, and state pre-k) controlling for maternal and household characteristics (e.g., demographics and employment status), state-level time-varying characteristics (e.g., unemployment rate), time-diary characteristics (e.g., weekday versus weekend day) and month and year fixed effects. I add interactions to examine whether these associations vary by the timing of mothers’ work on the calendar day: whether most of mothers’ work hours occurred during the daytime (8am to 4pm; 21%), evening (4pm to 12am; 6%), or night (12am to 8am; 2%) or the mother did not work on the calendar day (71%).

Results: The associations between ECE spending and mothers’ time with children depended on the timing of mothers’ work hours. A $1,000 increase in Head Start spending was associated with mothers spending 22 fewer minutes in active child-care on days that they worked evenings and 27 fewer minutes in developmental child-care on days they worked nights. A $1,000 increase in pre-k spending was associated with 15 more minutes in active child-care on days they worked evenings and 6 more minutes in developmental child-care on days they worked daytime hours. I found little evidence that child-care subsidy spending was associated with either outcome. The effects of Head Start and pre-k spending were concentrated on weekdays and are robust to including state fixed effects.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings suggest mothers who work nonstandard hours might spend less time with their children, especially in educational activities, than those who work daytime hours when their children are enrolled in Head Start or pre-k. Child-care subsidy programs, which more closely tie mothers’ work hours to subsidized child-care hours, do not appear to shape mothers’ time with children. Future research should examine the implications for children’s developmental outcomes.