Child Care Employment : Implications for Women's Self Sufficiency and for Child Development. Working Paper Series / Marcy Whitebook and Deborah Phillips.

Reliable child care services are widely viewed as pivotal to the success of welfare reform because most welfare recipients depend on child care in order to seek, gain, and maintain employment. Others of the working poor need it to avoid dependency on public assistance. As a result, current policy decisions and research efforts are largely focused on how to build the U.S. child care supply, but little attention has been paid to child care employment itself as a precarious, low-wage job sector. Current decision making is driven by an emphasis on child care as an essential support service for working parents, with little regard for the fact that child care employment also involves urgent and complex research and policy questions. Child care is one of the fastest-growing occupations in the country, and one of the largest employers of low-income women; it is being increasingly identified as a job opportunity for women coming off welfare; and the poor conditions that are characteristic of child care jobs raise serious concerns not only about the viability of child care employment as a living-wage job, but also about the quality of services available to millions of children. (Contains 42 references.) (Author)

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