Child Care and Work Absences: Trade-Offs by Type of Care

Parents face a trade-off in the effect of childcare problems on employment. Whereas large settings may increase problems because of child illness, small group care may relate to provider unavailability. Analyzing the NICHD Study of Early Child Care, we find that child-care centers and large family day care lead to mothers' greater work absences because of a sick child, but not to maternal job exits. Greater work absences because of unavailability of small home-based providers are associated with mothers' job exits, especially when mothers have low earnings and use nonrelative caregivers. Our findings accentuate the need for improved hygiene practices in child care, expanded personal leave coverage for parents, and greater backup care for sick and well children. Key Words: child care, families and work, maternal employment. A considerable body of research examines the consequences of nonmaternal child care for children's development (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2005; Vandell, 2004). Less attention has been paid to how the type and quality of child care relate to mothers' employment, and the research that does exist has focused on the cost and availability of care (Bainbridge, Meyers & Waldfogel, 2003; Connelly & Kimmel, 2003; Hofferth, 1996). The current study adds to the existing literature by examining the reliability of different types of care arrangements and the consequences of unreliability for missed work and job exits. This topic is important because parents' frequent, unanticipated absences resulting from child-care problems may lead to employers' sanctioning or firing them, and parents' scrambling to locate backup arrangements may lead them to give up on the labor market. Our study adds to the modest body of work on these topics in several ways. Most prior studies have not considered missing work because of both provider unavailability and child illness, have relied on cross-sectional or retrospective designs, and have been based primarily on samples from outside of the United States or on small, nonrepresentative (e.g., low-income or singleemployer) samples within the United States. We use the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care (SECC), which gathered information about child care and maternal employment at 3-month intervals from birth to age 3 in a large sample of children from nine states (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network 1999b). The coverage of multiple states is important, given the stateto-state variation in regulation and traditions of child care in the United States (e.g., Blau, 2001; Queralt & Witte, 1999). CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK Drawing on the absence literature's distinction between avoidable and unavoidable absences (Harrison & Martochhio, 1998), we consider two ways in which child care problems might lead to work absence: because of child illness and because of provider unavailability. Employers may perceive missing work because of a child's illness as excusable, because they see a child's illness as outside of the employee's control, recognize a parent's desire to nurse a sick child, or understand the difficulty of finding sick-child care. Missing work because arrangements for child care fall through may be seen as less excusable by employers who may believe that the parent should be able to find a more reliable child-care provider or have backup arrangements for well children. The type of child care the mother uses may affect her likelihood of experiencing these more or less "excusable" absences. More formalized child-care settings typically have policies that require sick children to be excluded, especially those with a fever or active diarrhea or vomiting (Polyzoi & Babb, 2004). Centers provide substitute caregivers in the child's room, however, when the regular teacher is absent, hi contrast, family day care providers are often more flexible about accepting sick children, but they typically provide care as an individual and make arrangements with the parent through social rather than formal relationships. …