3-041 - Access to Early Care and Education: Improving Policies to Support Young Children’s Development

Session Type: Conversation Roundtable

Integrative Statement

Traditional conceptualizations of access to early care and education (ECE) focus on the availability of slots for young children and the price of care. Yet this narrow picture of access doesn’t include other aspects of care that are important from a family’s perspective and that shape the child’s experience. A multi-dimensional definition of access developed by an expert workgoup includes other relevant concepts: “access means that parents, with reasonable effort and affordability, can enroll their child in an arrangement that supports the child’s development and meets the parents’ needs” (Friese et al., 2017). The purpose of this roundtable is to discuss and critique this proposed definition and to explore the opportunities and challenges the definition poses for researchers and policymakers focused on supporting young children’s development in ECE settings. Katherine Paschall will be the Moderator for the roundtable and will pose questions about the research, policy and practice implications of the proposed access definition. Martha Zaslow will address the dimension of developmental support for children and the quality features necessary to promote young children’s development. Rena Hallam will consider the system initiatives available to promote high quality care and their potential to facilitate meaningful quality improvements. Bentley Ponder will reflect on the policy implications of the dimension of reasonable effort and the work that states are doing on the dimension of meets the parents’ needs. Herman Knopf will speak about research strategies to understand availability and affordability of care and the applicability of research findings to child care subsidy policies.

Sub Unit

• Social Policy

Moderator

• Katherine Paschall, Child Trends

Panelists

• Herman Knopf, Anita Zucker Center for Excellence in Early Childhood Studies University of Florida

• Bentley Ponder, Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning

• Rena Hallam, University of Delaware

• Martha Zaslow, Society for Research in Child Development