Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Across Canada and the United States, a significant proportion of children ages 0-4 are cared for outside of their parents’ homes in an array of early childhood education and care (ECEC) arrangements. In most jurisdictions, parents may choose from a range of largely market-based options, including licensed childcare centres, licensed or registered home childcare (HCC) providers, and unlicensed HCC providers. Government oversight varies considerably; some parts of the sector are highly regulated, while others have minimal regulation and oversight.

While the system is arguably designed to facilitate parent choice and access, this policy framework has important and largely unexplored distributional implications for parents seeking safe and high quality child care. We hypothesize the administrative burdens of the child care system are felt unequally across parents and families. To examine these issues, we conducted a quasi-behavioural conjoint survey of 685 parents in the City of Toronto. We find that lower income parents in our survey display different childcare preferences – in particular, favouring home child care (relative to childcare centres) – to a much higher degree than higher income parents. This preference gap appears to be driven by cost considerations, and mostly disappears for lower income parents who report having child care subsidies. However, the lower income parents in our study were less likely to know whether they were/are eligible for subsidy. We explore these results in relation to the literature on administrative burdens, and investigate the implications with respect to access for vulnerable children to high quality ECEC services.