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Availability of child care in the United States: A description and analysis of data sources

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Demography

Abstract

Lack of high-quality, affordable, and accessible child care is an often-cited impediment to a manageable balance between work and family. Researchers, however, have been restricted by a scarcity of data on the availability of child care across all U.S. communities. In this paper we describe and evaluate several indicators of child care availability that have been released by the U.S. Census Bureau over the last 15 years. Using community- and individual-level analyses, we find that these data sources are useful for indicating child care availability within communities, even though they were collected for other purposes. Furthermore, our results generally suggest that the data on child care availability are equally valid across communities of different urbanicity and average income levels, although it appears that larger geographic areas more accurately capture the child care market of centers than that of family day care providers. Our analyses indicate that center child care is least available in nonmetropolitan, poor communities, and that family day care is most available in nonmetropolitan, mixed-income communities. We discuss the benefits and limitations of the data sources, and point to directions for future data developments and research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology and Institute of Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1007 West Harrison Street, mc 312, 60607, Chicago, IL

    Rachel A. Gordon

  2. School of Education and Social Policy, Northwestern University, USA

    P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale

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  1. Rachel A. Gordon
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  2. P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale
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Additional information

This work was supported by the Center on Parents, Children and Work, an Alfred P. Sloan Working Families Center at NORC and the University of Chicago, and by the MacArthur Network on the Family and the Economy, which is funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and is cochaired by Nancy Folbre and Robert Pollak. This study benefits from our interactions with both of these groups, as well as with the members of the Working Group on Communities, Neighborhoods, Family Processes, and Individual Development of the Social Science Research Council. Portions of this paper were presented at the meetings of the Population Association of America, held in New York, March 24, 1999, and at the national conference “Work and Family: Expanding the Horizons,” sponsored by the Business and Professional Women’s Foundation, the Center for Working Families at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and held in San Francisco, March 4, 2000. We are grateful for comments received at these sessions, as well as comments from Robert Moffitt on an earlier version of this paper. The individual-level analyses would not have been possible without authorization from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to draw on geocoded identifiers matched to the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979 cohort). We are especially grateful for the leadership and assistance of Michael R. Pergamit and Michael W. Horrigan, former and current Directors of Longitudinal Research at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The special tabulation of the 1990 Decennial Census of Population and Housing regarding the number and characteristics of child care providers in a ZIP code was a collaborative request headed by Bruce Fuller and conducted jointly with the two coauthors, with Sandra Hofferth, and with Martha Moorehouse. Funding for the special tabulation was provided in part by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; the Assistant Secretary’s Office for Planning and Evaluation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; and the Packard Foundation. The first author’s work on the planning study of the Federal, State, and County Workgroup of the Use, Needs, Outcomes, and Costs in Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (Grant U01MH54281), provided insights into ZIP code-level data on child care establishments. We are also grateful for the excellent research assistance of Yvonne Choong and for expert advice from Fay Booker, Data Librarian, Social Science Research Computing, University of Chicago.

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Gordon, R.A., Chase-Lansdale, P.L. Availability of child care in the United States: A description and analysis of data sources. Demography 38, 299–316 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1353/dem.2001.0016

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