“Complex child care arrangements are a common feature of working life for parents in the United States. However, parents with low-wage jobs – and especially single parents with histories of welfare receipt – make these arrangements within unusually tight time and financial constraints while facing limited child care options. Analyzing rich data from in-depth ethnographic interviews conducted in Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia, Next Generation researchers documented the challenges that low-income families face as they patch together a variety of arrangements to meet their child care needs. Unregulated or minimally regulated informal care typically plays a central role in these families – patchworks of care, meeting some families – needs very well but representing inadequate or unsafe arrangements of last resort for many others. Generally living in very poor urban neighborhoods, the families interviewed for these studies are a particularly disadvantaged subset of low-income families; but their stories raise important issues for policymakers concerned with protecting our most vulnerable children. The studies point to three policy directions that can promote the well-being of children while helping vulnerable low-income parents to sustain employment: continued investment in access to high-quality, flexible, and reliable child care; expanded initiatives to improve the quality of informal care; and the development of operational strategies in the welfare and child care subsidy systems to support the goal of promoting child well-being.” – Publisher’s description
