Child Care for Low Income Families:
Directions for Research...

Preface

Increased national attention to child care has also been spurred by rising costs, renewed understanding of the importance of children s early experiences to future development, and problems experienced by states in serving all low-income families who are eligible for child care assistance. Child care for children in low-income families is of particular interest given current federal and state reforms in education and welfare that may boost the numbers of very young low-income children in need of child care, as well as put added pressures on preschools to pay more attention to preparing children for school.

To focus and advance discussion on these compelling issues, the Administration for Children and Families of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (the federal agency that administers national child care assistance programs) asked the Board on Children and Families of the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine to convene three workshops on child care for low-income families. The first two workshops, held in February and April 1995, sought to distill the conclusions available from current research about child care for low-income families, especially research conducted since the National Research Council's 1990 publication of Who Cares for America s Children? (Hayes et al., 1990), and examine the current status of the child care delivery system. Discussions from those workshops are summarized in a report entitled Child Care for Low-Income Families: Summary of Two Workshops (Phillips, 1995). That report addresses factors that affect low-income families' patterns of child care use; child care and children s development, including safety, quality, and continuity; child care and economic self-sufficiency; and the structure and consequences of child care subsidies.

The third workshop, which is the subject of this volume, considered promising directions for research on child care, using the issues raised at the first two workshops as a stepping-off point. Participants at that workshop (held in July 1995) stressed a belief in the value of research as a guide for policy developments in this area.

Participants at the third workshop represented a range of vantage points on data needs in the area of child care, including an interdisciplinary group of scholars who have studied child care and related issues, foundation representatives, federal agency heads and staff (including those in the social service and statistical agencies), congressional staff, and state and local child care administrators. Their charge: to identify promising directions for research on child care that cuts across disciplinary boundaries, integrates different data collection strategies, and establishes a closer articulation between the interests of those who conduct research and the information needs of those who use research to inform policy and practice.

The workshops' focal point was poor and low-income families who use typical community- and family-based child care arrangements, as distinct from enriched early intervention programs that also may serve as child care. Low-income families were defined to include the working and nonworking poor, as well as families living just above the poverty line. Low income was typically used to refer to families with incomes below $15,000, which now include one out of every four children under age 6 (Hernandez, 1995).

Jack P. Shonkoff, Chair
Steering Committee on Child Care Workshops