Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Over the past 50 years, the number of four-year-olds in some kind of formal care arrangement has tripled. For low-income families in particular, the options for formal care are diverse, including state-funded pre-kindergarten (pre-k), federally-funded Head Start, and private child care. These programs vary substantially in their funding, regulatory structures, workforce characteristics, and service provision, and these differences may have important implications for children and families. For example, the extensive quality regulations of Head Start and pre-k typically result in higher quality care than the private child care sector, and children in these sectors tend to show larger academic gains. Head Start centers provide extensive services to children and families, and some evidence suggests these services can beneficially impact parenting behaviors. Finally, there are important structural differences in cost and hours of care available, which likely impact low-income families’ ability to support work and overall economic well-being. Given these meaningful differences, it is important to understand how low-income parents sort into these settings; unfortunately, we currently know little about how parents search for and select care within the formal sector. Understanding how low-income parents choose among these classroom-based options is critical for efforts to build effective large-scale ECE systems that can serve parents’ diverse needs while responding to their constraints. Specifically, state-designed information campaigns to support parent choice may be more effectively implemented with improved knowledge of parents’ preferences and search behaviors.  

This study provides the first descriptive evidence about differences in parents’ preferences, search processes, and satisfaction across the three major formal care sectors using a large, recent sample of low-income parents in Louisiana (N= 738). We surveyed a diverse sample of families in five parishes whose children were enrolled in 90 classrooms across childcare centers, Head Start programs, and traditional and charter public schools.

Our results suggest parents across sectors have strong preferences for warm, developmentally-focused care, spend little time searching for care, and are very satisfied with their selected programs. However, we also find substantial differences across sectors. For example, we find variation in preferences for convenience and structural features that align with differential service provision among sectors, suggesting that parents may be searching for similar care environments but sorting based on convenience or specific needs. Child care parents also search more than Head Start or pre-k parents; they are more likely to visit multiple providers, search using advertisements and the internet, and to report that the search was difficult. Finally, child care parents report lower levels of satisfaction with their selections than Head Start parents.  

Information campaigns can be useful in supporting parent decision-making only if parents lack necessary information to choose programs that meet their needs. Our findings—that parents vary in the extent to which they search for care and access information sources, but do not vary in their preferences for care quality—suggest that parents do not knowingly sort into formal sectors based on their strongest preferences. These findings indicate a potentially powerful role for information interventions in supporting optimal parent decision-making.