Who Participates and Who Benefits From Employer‐Provided Child‐Care Assistance?
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Author | Taryn W. Morrissey,Mildred E. Warner,Lena Hipp |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12359 |
L H WZB Berlin Social Science Center
T W. M American University∗
M E. W Cornell University∗∗
Who Participates and Who Benets
From Employer-Provided Child-Care Assistance?
Support from employers to help parents balance
work and family responsibilities has become an
increasingly important issue, particularly in the
United States, where public support for families
is scarce. Little is known about the effectiveness
of employer-provided child-care support. Who
participates in these programs, and what are
their benets? This study is among the rst to
address these questions using a dataset that
combines administrative with survey data from
employees at a large organization. Findings
indicate that employer nancial support for
child care can be structured so that employees
with the greatest need benet and employee par-
ticipation is not associated with stigma. Results
suggest the employer benets from increased
employee commitment and reduced employee
stress, but employees do not report increased
parent or child satisfaction with care. Although
employer nancial support alone cannot com-
pensate for structural problems with regard to
WZB Berlin Social Science Center Research Group “Work
and Care”, Reichpietschufer 50, 10559 Berlin, Germany
(lena.hipp@wzb.eu).
∗Department of Public Administration and Policy, School
of Public Affairs, American University,4400 Massachusetts
Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20016.
∗∗Department of City and Regional Planning, Sibley Hall,
Cornell University,Ithaca, NY 14853.
This article was edited by Jennifer Glass.
Key Words: child care, evaluation, work–family policy,fam-
ily well-being, stress, employment.
child care, it may reduce stress and increase
employee commitment in the workplace.
One of the most profound labor market devel-
opments in the past decades has been the
steady increase in women’s—particularly
mothers’—involvement in paid work. In the
United States, the labor force participation of
mothers with children younger than age 18 has
risen from less than 50% in the mid-1970s to
more than 70% since the year 2000. The changes
in the labor force participation of mothers with
young children have been even more dramatic:
Although in 2012 around 65% of mothers with
children younger than age 6 were in the labor
force (and 60% with children younger than age
3), it was only 40% back in 1976 (and 34%
for women with children younger than age 3)
(U.S. Department of Labor, n.d.). This dramatic
growth in maternal employment has made child
care a necessary component in most working
families’ daily lives. In 2011, more than 60%
of children aged 5 years and younger regularly
attended some form of nonparental child care,
attending for an average of 32 hours per week
(Laughlin, 2013).
High-quality, dependable, and affordable
child care, however, is difcult to nd (Gordon
& Chase-Lansdale, 2001; Gordon & Högnäs,
2006), particularly for very young children
as Phillips and Adams (2001) or Riley and
Glass (2002), for example, show. Unreliable,
low-quality child care, moreover, negatively
614 Journal of Marriage and Family 79 (June 2017): 614–635
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12359
Employer-Provided Child-Care Assistance 615
impacts parents’ employment (Usdansky &
Wolf, 2008, Warner, 2006), work-family stress
(Bianchi & Milkie, 2010; Jacobs & Gerson,
2001; Nomaguchi, 2009), and children’s devel-
opmental outcomes (National Institute of Child
Health and Human Development Early Child
Care Research Network 2002, 2006). Child care
is expensive, with costs averaging 7% of family
income in 2011, but low-income families can
spend upward of 30% of income (Laughlin,
2013).
During the past few decades, employers
increasingly recognized the importance of
reliable child care and have intervened with
work–life programs designed to enhance access
to child care and improve employment outcomes
and productivity (Galinsky, Bond, Sakai, Kim,
& Giuntoli, 2008; Glass & Estes, 1997; Glass &
Fujimoto, 1995). By offering support to working
parents, employers can retain valued employees
and ensure that they do not lose investments in
training when employees start having children.
Moreover, being a family-friendly organization
gives employers a competitive advantage in
recruiting workers (Davis & Kalleberg, 2006).
Subsidizing employees’ child care has become
an important component of high-commitment
work systems (Appelbaum, 2000; Osterman,
1995), reected in the metrics used by ranking
schemes on the “100 Best Companies to Work
For” by Working Mother magazine, among
others.
Although offering such benets can lead
to higher rates of satisfaction among workers
(Appelbaum, 2000), recent research has raised
concerns about how best to structure such poli-
cies to ensure that the full range of employees
participate and that they do not lead to negative
effects for organizations or employees. Program
participation is unevenly distributed. The
peripheral workforce, that is, low-status hourly
workers, part-timers, and temporary employees,
is often not eligible to participate in these pro-
grams, and managerial and professional workers
fear career repercussions when participating
in work–family programs (Wharton, Chivers,
& Blair-Loy, 2008; Williams, Blair-Loy, &
Berdahl, 2013; Williams & Boushey, 2010).
Furthermore, in cases where all employees are
eligible for employer assistance, employees
differ in their likelihood to participate (see, e.g.,
Morrissey & Warner [2009], who found that
those with the greatest need are most likely to
participate). In particular, the child-care needs
of low-skilled workers are quite diverseand may
not be met by a one-size-ts-all approach, such
as an on-site center operating during standard
hours. In addition, there may be institutional
factors—specically, a lack of information
regarding the benet and stigma in partici-
pating in work–family benets—that reduce
the likelihood of employee participation in
employer-provided policies among both low-
and high-status employees.
Because of the limited availability of
high-quality data, few studies to date have
examined the participation patterns and benets
of employer-provided child-care programs.
Much of the limited research on work–life
initiatives tends to be conducted by rms for
internal purposes and is not disseminated in the
academic literature. Moreover, extant research
on child-care support in the United States pri-
marily focuses on the public system for the
poor (Forry, Daneri, & Howarth,2013; Johnson,
Ryan, & Brooks-Gunn, 2012; Stoney, Mitchell,
& Warner, 2006).
Based on a representative dataset from a
large employer, this study closes an impor-
tant gap in the existing work–family literature
by examining the participation patterns and
benets of an employer-sponsored child-care
grant program. In particular, our study provides
answers to the following questions: What types
of workers make use of employer-provided
child-care grants? To what degree can
employer-provided child-care support help
parents reduce work–family stress? Can such
subsidies impact parents’ child-care choices and
their satisfaction with their child-care arrange-
ments? To what extent is the offer of child-care
support benecial for the employer?
S W P
Child Care in the United States
Child care is a necessary though costly pre-
requisite for parental employment. American
families spend between 6% and 18% of their
incomes on child care (Kimmel, 2006; Laugh-
lin, 2013). In 2011, the average annual cost
of center-based care was greater than that of
public college tuition in 35 states and the Dis-
trict of Columbia (Children’s Defense Fund,
2014). Although parents can save up money for
their children’s college education, this is not
the case with child care; parents have not had
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