An Analysis of Secondary Child Care Arrangements

This paper analyzes the secondary child care arrangements used by working mothers. All of the previous work examining child care has concentrated on just the principal or primary mode of child care that the family uses. For many families, however, there are additional arrangements which are made for child care, and little is known about the extent of these arrangements and their economic and demographic determinants. An important question is whether this secondary care is used primarily to enhance the quality of care that the child receives, or is required because of the lack of adequate primary sources of child care. In order to fully examine the use of secondary child care, this paper analyzes a variety of different data sources: the National Longitudinal Survey Youth Cohort (1986 and 1988), the June 1982 Current Population Survey, and the 1984–85 Survey of Income and Program Participation. The paper concludes that economic factors such as the mother's wage and her hours worked, along with marital status and the age of the child, are the major factors in determining whether a mother will use a supplementary arrangement for child care, factors which are similar to those important in the choice of the primary mode of care to be used. The paper also finds that the use of secondary care does not seem to be a mechanism to cope with the lack of supply of adequate and flexible child care, but may be a choice that a family makes to better tailor the care used in order to benefit both the parents and the child.