Child Care Needs and Work-Life Implications
| Author | Dong Won Kim,Tammy L. Henderson,Chaketa L. Whitfield,Susan Tinsley Gooden,Raquel L. Becerra |
| Date | 01 December 2002 |
| Published date | 01 December 2002 |
| DOI | 10.1177/073437102237814 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
REVIEW OF PUBLIC PERSONNEL ADMINISTRATION / Winter 2002
Becerra et al. / CHILD CARE NEEDS AND WORK LIFE
Child Care Needs and
Work-Life Implications
Examining Differences Across Income Levels
RAQUEL L. BECERRA
SUSAN TINSLEY GOODEN
Virginia Tech
DONG WON KIM
Yonsei University
TAMMY L. HENDERSON
Virginia Tech
CHAKETA L. WHITFIELD
U.S. General Services Administration
The need for child care is a work-life issue that affects families across all income
levels. These issues are particularly challenging in rural areas, where nontradi-
tional child care services may be more limited. Using data from a rural county in
Virginia, this article examines income level differences in parents’ reported child
care needs. We compare income groups along six variables. Our results suggest
that lower income households have significantly more child care needs than mod-
erate or upper income households along three of the variables: need for different
hours, need for child care closer to home, and need for special-needs child care.
These findings have implications for human resource managers as they consider
work-life policies in their organization.
Locatingquality,affordablechildcareisanissueformanyhouseholds,as
families’ dependency on child care has steadily increased over the past 30
years. In a recent study, child care was identified as the most pressing need of
families with children (Meyers & Kyle, 1996). Child care issues affect
employees who are parents. Researchers compared differences between
employed parents and nonparents and found that parents were much more
willing than nonparents to trade off salary or other benefits for child care assis-
tance. Among employed parents, “fathers were just as likely as mothers to be
Review of Public Personnel Administration, Vol. 22, No. 4 Winter 2002 295-319
DOI: 10.1177/073437102237814
© 2002 Sage Publications
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willing to make these trade-offs for dependent care benefits, in contrast to
their stance on time flexibility” (Galinsky, Bond, & Friedman, 1996, p. 118).
Child care issues are particularly important to working mothers, how-
ever, as more and more women are entering the paid workforce. In 1997,
nearly 60% of all women older than the age of 16 were in the labor force,
compared with 57% in 1989, 46% in 1975, and 37% in 1959. The compa-
rable percentages for men were 75% in 1997, 76% in 1989, 78% in 1975,
and 84% in 1959 (Economic Report of the President, 1998).
The rise in single-parent and dual-earner households has caused an
increase in the need for child care across all age levels. In 1993, 9.9 million
children under age 5 needed care while their mothers worked, and approxi-
mately 1.6 million of these children lived in families with monthly incomes
of less than $1,500 (U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census,
1995). Another 22.3 million children, ages 5 to 14, have working mothers
and many of them require care outside of school hours. In addition, more
than two-thirds of all infants receive nonparental child care during their
first years of life, with most enrolled for about 30 hours each week (National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 1995).
In general, single-parent families, low-income families, and/or families
with multiple children are most affected by child care issues (U.S. Depart-
ment of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and
Families, 1999). Regular child care arrangements are often beyond the
reach of working poor families unless they have access to subsidies. In fact,
child care expenses are often the second or third largest item in a low-
income family’s household budget. For example, child care expenses for
families with an income of less than $14,400 ($1,200 per month) devoted
25% of their income to child care (U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services, Administration for Children and Families, 1999).
Much of the previous research focuses on child care needs in general
(Capizzano, Adams, & Sonenstein, 2000; Hofferth, 1992) or child care
needs of low-income families (Besharov, Samari, & Germanis, 1999; Col-
lins, Layzer, Kreader, Werner, & Glantz, 2000; Meyers, 1993; Piotrkowski &
Kessler-Sklar, 1996; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
Administration for Children and Families, 1999). This article combines
these approaches by examining whether there are significant differences in
child care needs between income groups. This article proceeds by examin-
ing the evolution of family-friendly workplace policies in general, and their
impact on low-income families in particular. Then, we examine how recent
changes in welfare reform and governmental child care subsidies make child
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297
care particularly relevant for low-income families. We conclude by discuss-
ing the implications for our findings, offering suggestions to human
resource (HR) managers who are interested in providing supportive work-
life services for lower income employees.
WORK-LIFE EMPLOYEE BENEFITS
There is an impressive collection of research on family-friendly work-
place policies (e.g., Barnett, 1999; Davis & Cherns, 1975; Durst, 1999;
Kanter, 1977; Kim, 1998; McGuire & Liro, 1986; Newman & Mathews,
1999). Research typically divides employee benefits into two categories:
traditional benefits and family-friendly benefits. Traditional benefits
include “longstanding and widespread benefits such as health and life
insurance coverage, pension plans, and paid vacation days, as well as well-
established but more relatively recent and less pervasive benefits such as profit
sharing and stock options” (Caputo, 2000, p. 422). In addition, family-
friendly benefits include “relatively recent employee benefits such as flexi-
ble time, child care, flexible work hours, and parental leave” (Caputo, 2000,
p. 422).
During the past 75 years, employers have progressed from providing no
employee benefits to providing a standard package of benefits designed for a
male-supported family to the most recent move toward offering innovative
and flexible benefit packages to meet differing family needs (Kossek, Bar-
ber, & Winters, 1999; Piotrkowski & Kessler-Sklar, 1996). The increase in
women in the paid workforce and changes to the composition of American
families has become a vehicle for human resource managers to restructure
employee benefits packages (Caputo, 2000; Seyler, Monroe, & Garland,
1995). Supported by a legal framework, most notably including the Family
Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993 and the Federal Employees Family
Friendly Leave Act (FEFFLA) of 1994, family-friendly workplace policies
are generally designed to support employees faced with balancing the
demands of work and family in a contemporary work setting. Yet many
workers, especially low-income workers, cannot afford to take advantage of
these benefits because these benefits only provide unpaid leave.
Although the private and public sector have both seen an increase in
employers who implement some type of family-friendly policies, the major-
ity of employers have not implemented many nontraditional policies
(Lobel & Faught, 1996). For instance, in a nationally representative sample
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of young women intermittently surveyed from 1978 to 1995, Caputo
(2000) studied the availability of employee benefits and found that the
highest concentrations (about 75% to 80% on average) of working women
held jobs with traditional benefits such as medical coverage, life insurance,
retirement pensions, paid sick leave, and paid vacations. Much less com-
mon between 1978 and 1995 were the traditional benefits of profit sharing
(18% to 23%), stock options (15% to 18%), free meals (9% to 18%), and
free merchandise (18% to 28%). Also, less than 10% of working women in
the sample had access to the family-friendly benefit of child day care in any
survey year between 1983 and 1995 (Caputo, 2000).
Other family-friendly policy research has focused on explaining how the
adoption of family-friendly benefits, such as supports for child care and
elder care, is largely viewed as a practical response to the increasing propor-
tion of women in the workforce (Lambert, 2000). However, Osterman’s
(1995) study of a representative sample of U.S. firms reveals that the imple-
mentation of family-friendly benefits has little to do with whether compa-
nies rely heavily on the female labor market or whether the company experi-
enced problems with absenteeism and turnover. Instead, the adoption of
work-family programs is better accounted for by companies’ use of “high-
commitment work systems” that depend on worker input and loyalty for
success. Osterman (1995) argued that these new work systems are “poten-
tially linked to work/family benefits because, for the new work systems to
function, they require high levels of employee commitment to the enter-
prise and depend on employee initiative and employee ideas” (p. 685).
The work-life literature also has some disagreement of whether work-
family supports promote the added benefit of decreased absenteeism and
reduced employee turnover (Grover & Crooker, 1995). Some researchers
have found an increase in employee commitment and job satisfaction
(Goldberg, Greenberg,...
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