The Challenge of Patching Together Child Care

From 1975 to 2004, the labor force participation rate of mothers with children under age 18 rose from 47 to 71 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And while the availability of child care subsidies has increased dramatically in recent years, the Urban Institute reports that nationally only between 10 percent and 15 percent of eligible children benefit from child care subsidies from the Child Care and Development Fund, the main source of federal funding for this help.

While complex child care arrangements are a common feature of working life for many parents in the United States, parents with low-wage jobs — especially single parents with histories of welfare receipt — make these arrangements within unusually tight time and financial constraints, while facing limited child care options. For example, Maria, a 28-year-old mother from Cleveland interviewed for an MDRC study, juggles a complex schedule of day and night jobs and alternates between formal and informal arrangements to cover the care needs of her three children (a preschooler and two teenagers), as the figure below shows.

MDRC’s Next Generation project, a collaboration with university-based scholars, aims at understanding how welfare, income, and employment policies affect the well-being of low-income children. The project’s interdisciplinary approach includes in-depth ethnographic interviews with low-income families conducted in Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia.

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