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Child Care & Early Education
Child care and early education programs can play a critical role in families’ lives by both supporting parents’ employment and fostering children’s development. But parents and policymakers alike face real challenges in achieving these two goals simultaneously. For low-income parents, who often work at jobs with low wages and irregular schedules, the difficulties of securing affordable, accessible, and reliable high-quality care can be formidable. For policymakers, a tension exists between investing in systems of high-quality child care and early education and providing low-cost care to as many families as possible.
Child care research undertaken through the Next Generation project examines how various welfare and work programs — and the child care policies embedded within them — have influenced families’ child care decisions and experiences and the consequent effects on parents’ employment and children’s development. This research also draws insights from ethnographic analyses using data from in-depth, longitudinal interviews.
MDRC has several projects focused on understanding how child care and early education environments can not only support parental employment but also directly improve child well-being. The Evaluation of Child Care Subsidy Strategies, a collaboration between Abt Associates, MDRC, and other partners, uses a random assignment research design to examine the effects of alternative child care subsidy policies on parents’ ability to find and keep jobs, on the quality of child care parents use, and on children’s well-being. MDRC’s Foundations of Learning Project focuses on enhancing quality of care in preschool settings through innovative teacher-training strategies, in order to promote low-income children’s emotional, behavioral, and academic readiness upon school entry. Our most recent initiative, the Head Start CARES Project, is testing the effects and implementation of a set of evidence-based strategies to improve the social and emotional development of children in Head Start classrooms.
As part of the Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ Demonstration and Evaluation Project, MDRC has worked closely with Early Head Start sites in Kansas and Missouri to enhance the employment component of their existing two-generation services to parents with young children. The child-directed services in this program include both parenting-related services and services designed to improve the quality of children’s child care arrangements. In a multisite experimental evaluation, MDRC will examine the effects of this approach on parents’ employment, their parenting skills, and their children’s well-being.
Finally, MDRC and ideas42 are leading the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project, sponsored by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which is the first major opportunity to apply a behavioral research lens to programs that serve poor families in the United States — programs like cash assistance, child care, child support, and child welfare. The project will apply behavioral insights to issues related to operations, implementation, structure, and efficacy of social service programs and policies. The ultimate goal is to learn how tools from behavioral science can be used to improve the well-being of low-income children, adults, and families.
Key Documents on Child Care & Early Education
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