In addition, low-income families place a special emphasis on issues of safety and trust in the provider. There is consistent evidence of a relatively low supply of care for infants, for school-age children, for children with disabilities and special health care needs, and for parents with unconventional or shifting work hours. These scarcities exacerbate other barriers that low-income families experience in matching type of care used with type of care that best meets their needs. There is a very wide range of quality within every type of care. Numerous observational studies have demonstrated that variation in quality has discernible and significant effects on children's development, perhaps more so for low-income children .
Continuity of care is more an elusive dream than a reality.
Unstable child care affects all families, but poor and low-income families are unduly affected by irregular and shifting work schedules, marginal employment, and, sometimes, the financial necessity of relying on fragile child care arrangements that can impede their efforts to obtain stable and reliable child care for their children. Low-income parents who work and those in school cite child care costs as a major problem. The degree of the problem varies with access to subsidies. Disruptions in funding raise concerns about continuity of care for children and their parents, and may actually lead some families to cycle back onto public assistance when the loss of child care disrupts employment. Subsidies now operate as a system driven by parents' activities, with source of funding changing as families move from nonworking poverty to low-income work and beyond.