ANN ARBOR—Children of low-income, working parents who receive subsidies typically spent an additional 19 hours per week in formal care than children whose parents did not receive subsidies, according to a new study co-authored by a University of Michigan expert.

“These findings are significant because formal arrangements, such as pre-school or child care centers, can foster cognitive development and school readiness,” said Sandra Danziger, a professor of School of Social Work and research professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. The research did not have specific findings regarding whether children who spent more time in pre-school or child care centers had better outcomes than children who spent less time in formal arrangements.

Danziger conducted the research with lead author Julia Henly of the University of Chicago and Elizabeth Ananat of Duke University. They will present their findings Saturday (Jan. 13) at the Society for Social Work and Research Conference in San Francisco.

Unlike other research that focused on an individual child’s care arrangements, this study examined how subsidy use is related to the total sum of non-parental care used by all children under 14 years of age in a household.

The research also examined the child care arrangements of parents whose jobs included evening, weekend or variable-hour employment. Parents who worked some evening hours were less likely to use formal child care, but used more child care hours overall, even after controlling for such factors as the amount of time they worked. Compared to children whose parents worked exclusively daytime hours, the children of non-standard workers spent more hours in non-parental care. This care, the researchers said, was more often with informal providers, such as neighbors, relatives and friends.

The researchers used data from the Women’s Employment Study, which tracked more than 700 low-income families in a Michigan county. The analyses involved three waves of data (1999, 2001 and 2003) regarding care arrangements in the previous year for children younger than 14. They compared formal arrangements with care in relative and non-relative homes, and examined the total numbers of all care hours and types of care arrangements.

“By examining all care in the last year, rather than restricting our focus to a primary provider at a point in time, we find that multiple arrangements across the year are the norm and there is great diversity in patterns of care,” the researchers said. For example, more than half of the respondents, 53 percent, reported two or more arrangements.

The researchers found that subsidies provided by federal and state funding are an important policy for low-income, working families, but less than half of eligible families in this study received them. Further research needs to address how policies can reach a broader range of eligible families and better support the needs of parents with nonstandard work schedules.

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