Instability in patchworks of child care when moving from welfare to work

We use longitudinal, qualitative interview data collected from 38 initially welfare-reliant women in Cleveland, Ohio to examine the factors driving instability in child-care arrangements when women transitioned from welfare to work. Grounded theory analysis revealed that decisions about care were circumscribed by scarce social and economic resources, women went to extraordinary lengths to patch together arrangements that typically involved multiple providers, relative care was central to patchworks of care, and patchworks of child care were often highly unstable. These complex arrangements and their instability were influenced by mothers' desires to find the most suitable arrangements for their children within resource and job constraints, dissatisfaction with providers, difficulties accessing subsidies, and changes in provider availability. Findings suggest that policymakers must consider instability in patchworks of multiple child-care providers as they consider alternatives for meeting low-wage working women's and children's needs for safe, affordable, accessible, and enriching nonmaternal child care. Key Words: child care, poverty, qualitative data, single mothers, welfare reform. In 1996 Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) to reform the federal welfare program Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The central goal of this reform, which imposed strict work requirements, sanctions for noncompliance, and time limits on welfare receipt, while at the same time providing an array of work supports, was to encourage welfare-reliant parents (mostly single mothers) to enter the paid labor force. Between 1994 and 2001, the national welfare caseload declined by 57% (Corbett, 2002) and the labor force participation of low-income single mothers increased by almost 10 percentage points to approximately 78% (Blank & Schmidt, 2001). Central to parents' ability to move from welfare to work is their ability to shift the burden of their carework to other sources-center-based care or home-based care in family child-care homes or provided by relatives or nonrelatives. This shifting burden of care is neither new nor specific to low-income women. As women's labor force participation has increased over the past 30 years, child-care arrangements have shifted to now "span every conceivable combination of care by mothers, fathers, and others, the complexity of which tends to get lost in efforts to categorize and portray them" (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000, p. 303). Low-income women constrained by limited economic and social resources may face complexities not encountered by more advantaged families (Harrington Meyer, 2000). Although welfare reform has included the expansion of resources for subsidized (typically center-based) child care, to date we know little about the care arrangements former welfare recipients rely on or the problems they encounter in providing adequate care for their children. In this article we draw on longitudinal, qualitative interview data to describe the patterns of child care among welfare-reliant mothers in Cleveland, Ohio who faced strict work requirements and time limits. Initially we sought to understand the arrangements women made for the care of their children when they were obligated to enter the paid labor force. Simply put, where were children when their mothers were working? Observing a consistent pattern of a patchwork of child care, either in arrangements that changed over time or in the use of multiple arrangements at any given time, we then asked: What factors drove these changing, multiple, and often unstable care arrangements? That is, how did families parse preferences, resources, and constraints as they made decisions about child care? Below we review the literature on welfare reform and child care, outline our methods, present an overview of our findings regarding patterns of child care among these initially welfare-reliant women, and finally examine the factors driving the common pattern of instability we observed in child-care arrangements. …