Five Questions for Ajay Chaudry
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July 5, 2007 1. Why is child care important to struggling families? Low-income parents often work many hours for modest earnings. They have jobs with limited flexibility and are more likely to face schedule changes and bouts of unemployment. Having good stable child care is a pillar to being able to work. Equally important—if not more important—is the impact that child care can have on kids, especially on those under five. Given all that we know about child development, the importance of stability and of trusting relationships with adults, those early years have enormous impact on kids’ long-term outcomes and prospects. For struggling families, the cost of child care is very high. It’s second to housing for many U.S. families. If we’re not going to sacrifice kids’ development, we need to help working families meet their child care needs. High child care costs and market constraints raise the possibility that parents could make the wrong choice. The costs of those bad choices reverberate more broadly over time if children are not achieving their potential to contribute to society. Low-income families care about quality, but it can take a back seat in decision making since they have to try to find the most stable, reliable, and cheap care. Stability trumps quality for the low-income families. These are cross-cutting issues that all American families face, but the effects are more acute for lower earners. That’s why balancing work and family has become a major touchstone for American policy. 2. What did you learn by following the New York City families for Putting Children First? I followed 42 New York City families, mostly single-mother, with a child born shortly after the 1996 welfare reform law. The mothers worked a lot and relied on earnings as the primary sources of family income. They didn’t have much room to arrange their family life around the work schedule. Good, reliable stable child care was hard to find and harder to keep. Parents often had to piece together various child care arrangements. At any point in time, they would have one primary arrangement—say, at a day care center for 20 or 30 hours a week or a family child care provider for 40 hours—plus a relative to pick up and watch the children for a few additional hours. With weekend work, they averaged from two to three child care arrangements at any one time. The average arrangement lasted less than six months. So from birth through age four, the children averaged 13 child care arrangements. A child can not form that many trusting relationships in that short a time. I came to really admire the tenacity and strategic thinking that these moms developed over time. How they went from trying to find the easiest arrangements quickly to knowing what good quality was and then, for many, struggling to actually find the care they wanted—and when it was good quality—to make it last. They were very concerned about the impact that patchwork arrangements were having on their children. Child care was really to buy hours so that the moms could work. Yet, research shows that good quality child care has positive developmental effects. It’s not nearly as important as good parental or guardian care in the home, but the care outside the home can be a boost. In fact, care outside the family can have a better—or worse—impact for low-income families, depending on the quality, than for other families. 3. What other issues are important to low-income working families? Our new Low Income Working Families project sets out a framework for what is important based on the idea that these are working families—much more so than ever before. Making work pay is very crucial to our framework. We’ve moved to a social policy system in which earnings must be the primary source of family budgets. But too many families are having their budgets eaten up by just a few costs. They can barely get ahead and more often fall behind in meeting their family’s basic needs. Given the low wages that families make relative to what they need, we have to figure out ways to make work pay. That could involve a combination of refundable tax credits, setting minimum wage and the earned income tax credit (EITC) at appropriate and complementary levels so that we are rewarding work through wages but also providing incentives to earn more income. Employment is also much less stable for low-income families. Higher- income families can survive the gaps. But those with low wages can lose an apartment. If a parent gets sick, the effects cascade. We could work on ways for families to develop more assets so they can better weather storms. We’ve learned that the unemployment system is deeply flawed and varies widely across states. How do we feel about creating a more even playing field for those who experience job loss in the low-wage labor market? Another issue is growth in employment opportunities for working families. Too many jobs in the low-income economy are dead-end. There are no pathways and no consistent incentives to be more productive over time. Families need to be placed on trajectories for employment growth, not just for making ends their meet a month at a time. 4. What are the new Low-Income Working Families project goals? Our goals are to help define a comprehensive framework for addressing the needs of low-income families. Olivia Golden, who recently left Urban Institute to work for New York State, started much of this work. She and colleagues here defined a safety net around five broad goals. The aims are to make work pay, to identify gaps in employment, to provide workers with career ladders, to help parents balance work and children, and to make sure child development programs are designed with working families in mind. Our framework focuses on the children. Besides child care, many other policies can support an adult working and also bolster their families. We’ve been looking at parental leave. California was the first state to expand its temporary disability program to provide some paid parental leave. Is that a good model to learn for what other states could do? We’re asking the same question on the health care front, watching as Massachusetts strives to reduce the numbers of the uninsured. We’ll be using the framework to develop a new set of policy possibilities. With a more work-based center to the social policy system, what should a new safety net based on work look like? We’re also studying risk and ways to prevent families from spiraling downward after a minor setback or illness. Our crosscutting work on particular populations of low-income families looks at immigrants, the hard-to-employ, and the disabled. We also have an agenda for employers. It’s a multi-factored front. 5.What are some potential approaches to achieve these goals? To look closely at state initiatives to see how they’re addressing some of the gaps in the safety net. On parental leave at the birth of a child, we’ll be looking at what is the appropriate amount of benefits—should that be governed by states or defined through national legislation. The United Kingdom, for instance, provides 26 weeks of paid leave with 90 percent of wage replacement for the first six weeks and weekly payments thereafter. California provides only 55 percent of current wages for the first six weeks and nothing thereafter. Of course, that’s more than the other 49 states currently do. We’re also interested in looking at states that provide guaranteed child care supplements to working families below a certain income, as opposed to rationing the pot, which is common in most states. There’s a movement toward providing half-day kindergarten. How can we design models for services that blend pre-K funding with child care funding to better meet the needs of low-income families? We have broad and deep expertise at the Urban Institute to pull together for this, and we have a good foundation for team building that began over a decade ago with the Assessing the New Federalism project. |
