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The impact of public investments in infant-toddler child care

Fri, October 5, 4:45 to 6:15pm, Doubletree Hilton, Room: Fiesta II and III

Abstract

Despite the recent expansion of public preschool programs (Barnett et al., 2016), fewer public investments support infant and toddler care. One notable exception are Early Head Start-Child Care Partnerships (EHS-CCP), established by the federal government in 2014. Between January and March 2015, EHS-CCP grants increased infant-toddler child care slots roughly 28% over the pre-existing supply of Early Head Start slots (Office of Early Childhood Development, 2016). The Partnership grants provided full-day, full-year infant-toddler care through existing center and home-based providers. These providers, in turn, were required to comply with Early Head Start standards. In addition, parents using EHS-CCP care gained access to comprehensive family services, a hallmark of Head Start programing.
The implementation of EHS-CCP offers the opportunity to explore the following research questions: (1) does an increase in the availability of affordable infant-toddler child care promote parental employment among low-income families?; and (2) does expanded access to high quality care through EHS-CCP improve children’s developmental outcomes? For research question (1), I can link data on the location of grantees (publicly available, shown in Figure 1) with geocoded American Community Survey (ACS) data to explore parental employment outcomes, including employment status, weeks worked during the past 12 months, and income. I am limited in my ability to address research question (2) due to a lack of national, geocoded panel data with measures of young children’s developmental outcomes. For both research questions, a final limitation is the lack of data on local supply of infant-toddler child care, which would allow me to investigate the degree to which EHS-CCP increased the availability of care for families in local program areas and the likelihood of detecting effects.

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