ELYRIA, Ohio — Dinner (chicken and mashed potatoes) was long over, teeth were brushed, and a rousing game of Monopoly had come to a close. It was 9 p.m., and the children nestled into bed under blankets emblazoned with superheroes.

The tranquil domestic scene plays out nightly here, not in a family home, but behind a brightly lighted storefront next to Tuffy’s auto repair, the site of a new child care center that is open 24 hours a day.

Day care is slowly becoming night care in today’s economy, as parents work ever longer days, take on second jobs and accept odd shifts to make ends meet.

“No one works Monday through Friday, 9 to 6 anymore,” said Tiffany Bickley, a cook whose 6-year-old daughter, Airalyn, recently started going to the center, ABC & Me Childcare. “No one.”

About 40 percent of the American labor force now works some form of nonstandard hours, including evenings, nights, weekends and early mornings, according to Harriet B. Presser, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. That share is expected to grow with the projected expansion of jobs in industries like nursing, retail and food service, which tend to require after-hours work.

At the same time, working hours are less predictable than they once were. ...

“You don’t want to put your 2-year-old at a child care center at 2 a.m.” said Gina Adams, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. “It just doesn’t feel right.”

There are some indications now that this might be changing. The National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies said it was hearing from members that providers were offering more nontraditional hours, though it added that it did not formally track the data.

While overnight care is still relatively rare, evening hours are no longer so unusual, providers say. Donna McClintock, chief operating officer for Children’s Choice Learning Centers Inc., which runs 46 employer-sponsored child care centers across the country, said that demand for nontraditional hours had grown and that centers providing care after-hours care made up a large part of the company’s recent growth. About a fifth of the company’s centers have added nontraditional hours in the past few years, she said.

Labels: child care, children, culture, day care, economics, parenting, single parenting

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Forget designer strollers and organic baby formula, just providing a child with the basics has become more than most parents can afford.

The cost of raising a child from birth to age 18 for a middle-income, two-parent family averaged $226,920 last year (not including college), according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That's up nearly 40% -- or more than $60,000 -- from 10 years ago. Just one year of spending on a child can cost up to $13,830 in 2010, compared to $9,860 a decade ago. ...

The battered economy has also taken a toll, of course. Many employers scaled back or even did away with medical coverage in recent years, leaving many families to cover that bill, said Lino. At the same time, costs for doctors visits, medications and other health services also climbed. As a result, health care costs for families with children rose 58% over the decade, he said.

All of this comes at a time when incomes are shrinking and unemployment is near an all-time high. Over the past decade, median household income has fallen 7%, according to a recent report from the Census Bureau.

The child care crunch

The early years are among the toughest for parents who must find a way to afford all of those costs, plus child care.

"It takes half of my paycheck to pay for my child care -- you start to feel like, Is this even worth it?" said Anna Aasen, a mother of two from Roseburg, Ore.

Although housing generally represents a family's largest expense, putting more than one child in day care tips the scales.

Labels: child care, children, culture, day care, economics, parenting

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For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named.

The reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that erupted after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a “culture of poverty” to the public in a startling 1965 report. Although Moynihan didn’t coin the phrase (that distinction belongs to the anthropologist Oscar Lewis), his description of the urban black family as caught in an inescapable “tangle of pathology” of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own misfortune. ...

With these studies come many new and varied definitions of culture, but they all differ from the ’60s-era model in these crucial respects: Today, social scientists are rejecting the notion of a monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty. And they attribute destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation.

To Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, culture is best understood as “shared understandings.”

“I study inequality, and the dominant focus is on structures of poverty,” he said. But he added that the reason a neighborhood turns into a “poverty trap” is also related to a common perception of the way people in a community act and think. When people see graffiti and garbage, do they find it acceptable or see serious disorder? Do they respect the legal system or have a high level of “moral cynicism,” believing that “laws were made to be broken”?

As part of a large research project in Chicago, Professor Sampson walked through different neighborhoods this summer, dropping stamped, addressed envelopes to see how many people would pick up an apparently lost letter and mail it, a sign that looking out for others is part of the community’s culture.

In some neighborhoods, like Grand Boulevard, where the notorious Robert Taylor public housing projects once stood, almost no envelopes were mailed; in others researchers received more than half of the letters back. Income levels did not necessarily explain the difference, Professor Sampson said, but rather the community’s cultural norms, the levels of moral cynicism and disorder.

The shared perception of a neighborhood — is it on the rise or stagnant? — does a better job of predicting a community’s future than the actual level of poverty, he said. ...

Seeking to recapture the topic from economists, sociologists have ventured into poor neighborhoods to delve deeper into the attitudes of residents. Their results have challenged some common assumptions, like the belief that poor mothers remain single because they don’t value marriage.

In Philadelphia, for example, low-income mothers told the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas that they thought marriage was profoundly important, even sacred, but doubted that their partners were “marriage material.” Their results have prompted some lawmakers and poverty experts to conclude that programs that promote marriage without changing economic and social conditions are unlikely to work.

Labels: culture, day care, Marriage, poverty, single parenting

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Research published today by the Department for Work and Pensions explores the characteristics and circumstances of families and children in 2008. The report is based on analysis of the Families and Children Study (FACS). This is a longitudinal survey focusing on the circumstances of families in Britain. The study began in 1999, with a representative sample of all lone parents and low/moderate income couple families. From 2001 a representative sample of lone parents and all couple families with dependent children were interviewed. ...

The main findings are that:

* Almost one quarter (23 per cent) of children lived in a lone parent family. Lone parent families were more likely than couple families to live in social housing and to be in the lowest income quintile.
* Four out of five families had at least one parent working 16 or more hours per week (pw). 55 per cent of lone parents worked 16+ hours pw and 57 per cent of couple families had both partners doing so. Forty one per cent of lone parent households were workless compared with 5 per cent of couple households.
* One in six children (16 per cent) lived in a household where no one worked over 16 hrs per week. The majority of these (11 per cent of all children) were in lone parent households.
* Forty nine per cent of lone parents working less than 16 hrs pw reported running out of money before the end of the week or month. Thirty six per cent were worried about money ‘almost all the time’.
* Over half (58 per cent) of children with working mothers were placed in childcare. Use of informal childcare (44 per cent) was more prevalent than formal childcare (31 per cent).
* Perceptions of the affordability and quality of childcare remained more positive than negative. However, a quarter of mothers reported that there was ‘not enough childcare’ (25 per cent) and that childcare was ‘not at all affordable’ (27 per cent) in their local area. Mothers were more positive about the quality of childcare: over a half (59 per cent) said it was ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ good.

Labels: children, day care, economics, poverty, single parenting, United Kingdom

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Germany reported last week that its birthrate has reached a historic low. That doesn’t bode well for Europe’s largest economy as it struggles to support a graying population. ...

I’d put the reasons into two categories. One has to do with the structure of German society. Many schools let out earlier than in other European countries. Mom or dad must be home to cook the main midday meal. Then follow the afternoon child activities. This set-up makes it very hard for a parent to work, forcing a choice between parenthood and a full-time job.

Another big structural hurdle: Daycare in Germany is limited. You should have heard the bitter complaints of the working women of East Germany when reunification caused many of their state-run daycare centers to close. At that time, daycare in West Germany was almost unheard of. This is another structural norm that forces a parent to choose between work and having a child.

But attitude also plays a role. The Germans themselves admit they could be more child-friendly. My best German friend tells of being shooed away as a child when she tried to play in the courtyard of her apartment building.

Labels: children, day care, demographics, economics, Europe, gender, Germany, natalism

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Single mothers moving out of public assistance, and low-income families searching for affordable child care, will applaud the $4 billion increase in stimulus funds for programs like Head Start, Early Head Start, and Child Care Development Block Grants, which support state programs for subsidized care. But it's far from certain whether the children who actually receive these services will be better off, and that's Penelope Leach's particular concern.

This British child development expert, the best-selling author of Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five, has earned an international reputation for helping readers consider their offspring's point of view on matters like infant sleep disturbances and potty training. This new volume also offers a child-centered perspective, but Leach has moved out of the nursery and stands ready to make her mark on an entrenched ideological debate that asks whether nonmaternal child care helps or harms young children.

Actually, she thinks that's the wrong question to initiate a discussion on a contentious subject. Readers must first consider, she says, "what kind of care, where, by whom, for which children, from what age, for what hours, paid for by whom, and with what results?" ...

Still, she wants readers to come to grips with an unpleasant truth: Much of American day care is just plain "bad." Given the available options, infants in particular are better off at home with their mother, a family member, or a nanny. Working mothers of very young children express greater satisfaction with in-home care, in part because caregiver/infant ratios remain too high in most affordable group programs. That problem can delay the developmental milestones of underprivileged children already at risk because of family instability.

This is especially relevant for American families. About 12 percent of three-month-olds here are placed in day care, and another 24 percent are in family day care, where small groups of children are cared for in private homes. Though British child care practices track most closely with our own, fewer than one percent of three-month-olds attend day care in Great Britain, and just one percent are brought to family day care. Comparisons between American and other Western European practices are even more striking.

Labels: day care, family policy, motherhood, parenting, poverty

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