Child Care: Work & Family
by Arthur C. Emlen

New! The online magazine, Mothers Movement Online, in its April/May 2008 issue called Update:The Mothers Movement in the United States, has published an article by Arthur Emlen entitled, "Solving the Flexibility Solution."

Child care is a topic that cuts across many fields of practice, research, and public policy. Child care may not have held a central place in social work education, but it affects almost all fields of practice serving families. Decisions about child care are indeed an issue for employed parents and student parents, parents who are both and parents who are at home. All families make choices about child care.

After all, it is the parent's choice. Yet, as a society, we share responsibility for the quality of choices open to parents. How much do we know about those choices? Why do parents make the choices they do? What options are open to them? What outcomes result for the children? What policies might improve those outcomes?

The breadth of our responsibility is confirmed by the most comprehensive study to date about the relation between child care and children's development: the NICHD Study of Early Child Care. Launched in 1989, the study has followed more than a thousand newborns over seven years of life and is producing reports well worth reading as they appear. Already the findings have implications for policy. More favorable developmental effects are uniquely predicted 1) by the quality of child care experienced, 2) by less time spent in child care from infancy onward, and 3) most powerfully, by the influence of parenting and family circumstances. The compelling implication for policy is that, as problematic as the quality of much of America's child care is, the problem cannot be solved solely by achieving quality in child care settings. It also requires serious improvement on a host of quality-of-life issues for the family such as lack of parental leave, part-time jobs, manageable hours, and work flexibility; lack of financial flexibility relating to pay, benefits, tax burden, and ability to save; job stress, depression and mental health problems of mothers; and the lack of safe, supportive neighborhoods. The list should be longer. It adds up to why parents have difficulty making optimal choices. Whether or not children receive quality of care depends very much on a family's quality of life at home, at work, and in the neighborhood.

A reading list:

Here are six recent policy-related books defining child care problems and remedies.

The Silent Crisis in U.S. Child Care, edited by Suzanne Helburn (The Annals, May 1999).

Jack P. Shonkoff and Deborah A. Phillips, Editors. From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Child Development (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2000.

David Blau, The Child Care Problem: An Economic Analysis (Russell Sage, 2001).

Suzanne Helburn and Barbara Bergmann, America's Child Care Problem: The Way Out (St. Martin's Press, 2002).

Karen Schulman, Key Facts: Essential Information about Child Care, Early Education, and School-Age Care, (Children's Defense Fund, 2003 Edition).

Joan Lombardi, Time to Care: Redesigning Child Care to Promote Education, Support Families, and Build Communities, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003).

For some useful national and international sites, see links.

Also focusing on child care policy is a consortium of child care research partnerships having grants from the Child Care Bureau, Administration for Children and Families, US Department of Health and Human Services. This consortium has tackled a range of policy issues related to child care since 1995.

With the exception of Joan Lombardi's book which has some balance between supply-side (child care) and demand-side (parent) solutions, the above reading list sees a child-care-and-education system as the main solution to the child-care problem. None gives much attention to work and family except as part of the problem. So one might look to some other sources for consideration of positive contributions from the world of work. The first that comes to mind is a book by a research team at Portland State University: Margaret Neal, Nancy Chapman, Berit Ingersoll-Dayton, and Arthur Emlen, Balancing Work and Caregiving for Children, Adults, and Elders (Sage Publications, 1993). Look at the web site of Families and Work Institute, for example, two of their reports: Ellen Galinsky, Dana E. Friedman, and Carol A. Hernandez, The Corporate Guide to Work-Family Programs (1991); Dana E. Friedman, Ellen Galinsky, and Veronica Plowden, Parental Leave and Productivity (1992); or Ellen Galinsky's recent book Ask the Children.

Another source providing timely material and incisive commentary on work and family issues is Sue Shellenbarger's Work & Family column most Thursdays in The Wall Street Journal. Or see her book, Work & Family (NY:Ballentine, 1999).

Work & Family & Beyond

If society has a stake in the well-being of children, and shares responsibility for it, who are we talking about? Parent? Family? Neighborhood? Caregiver? Employer? Community? Government-Local, State, or Federal? And what responsibilities are we talking about? Parents have the choice, but don't control their options. Families cannot do it all entirely on their own. Neither can employers. Employers can do many things about the way they structure work that allows the flexibility employed parents critically need. But provide child care? The employer is just as dependent as parents on what is out there in the community. It would be silly to expect most employers to create an on-site center, and if they did, it would be unrealistic to suppose most parents would meet their needs in that way.

But will demand-supply economics in the marketplace magically meet family needs? Which is to say, will parents find a caregiver who is available close to home, is accessible at hours that fit work schedules, is willing to accommodate lateness and emergencies, is of the kind and quality this parent wants for this child, is inclusive of a child like theirs, and is offering care they can afford? All that complexity could never be planned by an agency. But could it be facilitated? A community can help make the child-care market work better if it has a well-financed resource and referral service, an "R&R". But even that can't magically improve the quality of care available for referral to parents, or make it affordable, or create safe neighborhoods.

We come back to the daunting, larger issues affecting quality of life for the family. An ever-growing proportion of American families face more hours of employment and use of child care than parents want, high pressure jobs with restricted flexibility, stress and fragility of mental health, eroding wages and benefits, inability to build a financial buffer, increasing tax burden, precarious job security, removal of public safety nets, weakening schools and social services, criticism and blame of parents instead of national resolve to strengthen the viability of families, and reluctance to establish rules of the game in business that invest in and sustain for another day those human resources in the work force as one might the natural environment. That's a mouthful. But the favorable child outcomes we were talking about depend on the quality of family life, which includes the quality of jobs. Not all employees are parents, but all employees come from parents. Where else can they come from?

If the quality of jobs is a key part of quality of life for families, and if the future well-being of children depends on it, what is the employer's responsibility? What should they do? What should they pay for? Medical benefits? What if they don't? What are the boundaries of what is reasonable to expect from parents, employers, caregivers, communities, and governments? To hazard an answer to this question here are some policy strategies for improving child care. My purpose is to convey a message of just how shared our responsibility is, yet just how unique our diverse contributions are.

More....

• Who's Responsibility: Some strategies
• Links to Other Sites
• Closer to Home: Child Care Research in Oregon
• Emlen's Research
• Emlen's Point of View

Arthur C. Emlen is Professor Emeritus, School of Social Work, Portland State University. For 16 years he was director of the Regional Research Institute for Human Services from 1973 to 1989. He has conducted research in the area of child care, work, and family for nearly 40 years. He is currently completing a book on the topic.