Gina Adams, a senior research associate in the Urban Institute's Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population, directs research on child care and early education. Among other projects, she co-directed a multi-year study on Child Care Subsidies and TANF, which resulted in four recently released reports on the complex interactions between the child care subsidy system and the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program, established by the 1996 welfare reform law and reauthorized in 2006.
Five Questions Archives
1. Why are child care subsidies so crucial for welfare-to-work parents?
Most parents on welfare must work or attend training to receive welfare. It would be impossible for them to do that, and be a responsible parent, if they didn't have someone to take care of their children. Subsidies help them afford child care, which can be both expensive and hard to find.
Child care subsidies are designed to make sure that parents don't have to choose between meeting their work requirements and being a good parent. Subsidies are more important than ever since 1996 when time limits were put on welfare. Time limits pressure parents to get into the workforce quickly. Finding affordable care for their children in such a short time frame can be the biggest hurdle.
These issues are even more pressing now, given that the most recent TANF reauthorization requires states to put a significantly higher proportion of their welfare cases into jobs and work-related activities.
2. Do the child care and welfare systems work well together?
Actually, three systems must work together to help a family moving from welfare to work get child care — the cash assistance system, the employment and training system, and the child care subsidy system. Each system is very devolved, so the melding can vary greatly by place.
A team of UI researchers, which Pamela Holcomb and I co-directed, just finished a study funded by the [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] Child Care Bureau that looked at 11 sites across the country to see how they were coordinating systems. We found enormous variation in how much parents had to do, whether the systems were in one agency or multiple agencies, how the caseworkers were involved, and who was responsible for doing what to ensure the family gets the subsidy.
Interestingly, there wasn't a lot of connection between the system's administrative complexity and what parents had to do. Parents cared only about the end result. Some localities may have three agencies involved, but parents have only to go one place and meet with one caseworker. Others might only have one agency, but the parents get shuffled among several different caseworkers.
There's no easy way to say whether any particular site did it right. Instead, we found some promising practices, as well as problematic ones, in many sites. On the promising side were attempts to simplify the process for parents. For instance, by giving more child care responsibilities to the welfare-to-work caseworker, or by setting it up so that parents have to work with only one worker who can manage the communication among the different systems.
But we also found conflicting priorities. For example, on the welfare-to-work side is the drive to get the parent into a work activity as soon as possible. The time limit clock is ticking. For families who already have found child care, that's no problem. For families that don't have child care, it can take time to find good care. Often, good child care programs have waiting lists.
So one important question is whether agencies give parents enough time to find the right child care. Agencies require families to start the work activities from a few days to two weeks after they apply for welfare, though will extend the deadline if parents can't find child care. Agencies we talked to felt that this approach worked well.
But talking with parents gave us a somewhat different message. Many parents talked about needing more time and help finding care. Although they find some place to put their children, it isn't clear that they've made the choices they want — which isn't good for anyone.
Another challenging area is that having a subsidy can — in some cases — be very tightly tied to a work activity or a job. Yet, work activities are often short-term and have gaps, and parents can lose their jobs — which means that the subsidy can be very unstable. A study in five states found that the average child care subsidy spell was 3 to 7 months. This is a problem for parents, agencies, and children because we know that kids need long-term stable relationships with caring adults.
3. What are some innovative state and local child care practices?
We have another study currently under way that looks at how state and local child care subsidy agencies can make it easier for parents to get and keep subsidies. A number of states are identifying ways to do this. For example, our earlier work found that many states required parents to report every change in their circumstances -- such as a change in job, schedule, or pay -- to make sure that the subsidy was at the right level. Yet, such precision creates burdens both administratively and for parents.
Our study finds that some states are experimenting with ways to be more flexible. Examples include finding alternative ways for parents to report changes, minimizing the kinds of changes they have to report, and not changing the subsidy unless the change is significant.
Simplifying the application form, using the same applications in all programs (such as food stamps and child care), and connecting data systems so that parents have to report changes to only one system are also being tried. So if a family reports an employment change to the employment system, the information gets sent to the child care system. Sharing data can be a win-win for everyone.
Not all good practices are complicated or expensive — and they can be easy for other states to adopt. My favorite example is putting the parent's recertification date on the bottom of attendance forms sent to providers. This allows the provider to work with the parent to make sure they recertify. It doesn't cost anything.
Often, the poorest localities can do amazing things through leadership and vision of the local agency management. One of the sites we visited consistently made parent-provider service top priority. Those workers would stay up all night to get those checks out on time if they had to. And when you talked with parents and providers in that site, you could tell that the program worked fairly well for them. This is in a state with relatively few resources.
Yet, sometimes, on paper it looks like a state has done something very innovative that we realize when we visit isn't working at all. For example, in theory, a family is supposed to be able to do all of their reporting by phone. But then we find out the agencies don't have enough people to answer the phones.
4. Is quality a goal of the child care subsidy system?
Yes and no. A small portion of the Child Care and Development Fund—which is the primary source of federal funding for child care—goes to help improve quality of child care overall. And a number of states contribute additional funds above that level. But it's too few dollars to influence the entire child care market. Most child care funds go out through subsidy vouchers designed to help families afford the child care that is already available. They're not designed to change the child care market itself.
Clearly, many state and local administrators in the country are working hard to figure out how to spend those dollars effectively to improve things for kids. Some states are experimenting with paying higher rates for higher quality care — which can be a promising strategy as long as states pay enough to really support quality. But it's difficult. Many states haven't raised their basic pay rates in years. The maximum amount that they'll pay doesn't cover a good range of the higher-charging providers.
States are in a quandary—pay more for better services and subsidize fewer families or hold rates steady and take more families off the waiting list? This is a very real trade-off for them since funding in recent years has stagnated and, recently, has started decreasing in some states.
5. What else is the child care team working on?
One of our most exciting projects is our study of child care providers and the child care subsidy system in five counties across the country. Such a study is long overdue since remarkably little is known about the child care providers upon whom the subsidy system depends — the last national study of child care providers was in 1990. We're examining who does and doesn't participate in the subsidy system and assessing whether they differ on some key indicators of quality. We are also looking at how various policies and practices affect providers.
One of the issues we are most interested in is exploring how our research results may spawn ideas about designing subsidies to support quality. For example, it allows us to think about how to design and frame policies to help bolster the parts of the system that aren't meeting the needs of children and families.
We also just released a study examining child care patterns by race and ethnicity. It warns policymakers and program administrators not to assume that national patterns hold true for any particular group. Our findings do show that non-parental care is a huge issue for all groups. Eighty percent or more of children younger than five with working parents are in non-parental care. But the kind of care varies. Black children are much more likely to be in centers. Hispanic children are the least likely to be in centers and the most likely to be in a relative's care.
What all this points out is that we really need to be thinking about how we can best support quality care in every setting. It is such a critical issue — I am often worried that the policy debate about school readiness and preparing children for school is focused too narrowly on developing prekindergarten programs for 4 year olds. While this is an exciting and important strategy, we can't afford to forget that the larger child care market, and the subsidy system serves millions of low-income children each day, and many of them are spending significant time in these settings.
If we don't also focus on how to support quality there — for the infants and toddlers whose brains are developing and who are getting that critical early foundation for future learning, for 3-4 year olds whose parents work full-time and who may not be able to use a part-day part-year preschool program, and for the school-age children whose after-school time is critical for their school success — then we can't ensure that all of our children will succeed.