A descriptive profile of state Child Care and Development Fund policies in states with high populations of low-income Hispanic children☆
Section snippets
Background: the federally legislated Child Care and Development Fund
The federal Child Care and Development Block Grant Act (1990, 2014) establishes a set of broad CCDF requirements, whereas more detailed program policies and administrative practices are enacted by state and local entities. The federal statute defines an eligible child as one who is under the age of 13, whose family income does not exceed 85% of the state median income and whose family’s assets do not exceed 1 million dollars, and who resides with one or more parents or guardians (hereafter,
The child care accommodation theoretical framework
The child care accommodation theoretical model specifies that families must undergo a series of trade-offs to select and utilize a nonparental child care arrangement (Coley, Votruba-Drzal, Collins, & Miller, 2014; Friese, Lin, Forry, & Tout, 2017; Meyers and Jordan, 2006, Weber, 2011). This theoretical framework and associated research have identified a number of factors that operate at the individual, family, and community levels to impact parents’ decisions about care. The accommodation model
Present study
Taken together, the aforementioned areas of policy regulation and practice illustrate circumstances that can potentially unfavorably, or favorably, influence Hispanic families’ utilization of CCDF benefits. To further examine state-level CCDF policy contexts, this study expands the child care accommodation theoretical model by using the framework of administrative exclusion to examine how state policies can support or interfere with Hispanic parents’ decisions to utilize child care subsidies
CCDF policies and practices in the 13 states
Table 3 presents a summary of the CCDF policy dimensions across the 13 states. The first panel shows the state-level policies we reviewed related to program eligibility. For six of the 13 states (Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington), the policy manuals specified that ESL participation is acceptable for CCDF eligibility. Policy manuals for seven of the 13 states (Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington) specified a minimum
Discussion
Expanding on the CCDF’s initial core mission to reduce the child care cost impediment to parental work, statutes have become increasingly focused on parental access to high-quality and more stable care and education opportunities for children. The demographic composition of eligible families has dramatically shifted since the inception of CCDF, with Hispanic families constituting a growing proportion of working income-poor families. Yet, Hispanic families have lower child care subsidy
Conclusions
The aim of this study was to provide an enhanced theoretical framework to better understand the ways in which CCDF policies and practices can illuminate a set of factors that may facilitate or interfere with utilization of benefits among eligible populations across race/ethnicity. Under-enrollment of low-income working Hispanic families in CCDF may reach beyond the candidate family and community ecological factors suggested by conventional theoretical frameworks. States face a variety of
Conflict of interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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This work has been funded by Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, the Administration for Children and Families, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. HHS-2013-ACF-OPRE-PH-0576.