Taking Pressure off of Families: The Impact of Child Care Subsidies on Mothers’ Work

ABSTRACT We shed light on the issue of work-family conflict caused by child care problems. Whereas the literature on the effects of child care subsidies on mothers’ work typically focuses on labor force participation as the outcome, we extend this research to explore work outcomes for employed mothers. We use new, quantitative data from the Philadelphia Survey of Child Care and Work to model the effect of child care subsidies on the work hours, shifts, and overtime problems of low- income urban mothers. Comparing subsidy applicants who do and do not receive cash payments for child care, we find that mothers who receive subsidies are 17% less likely to experience work-hour related problems on the job resulting from child care. Further, we find that the effect of the subsidy is weakly mediated by the quality of child care. Key words: child care, work-family conflict, subsidy, quality, low-income, mothers. 2 TAKING PRESSURE OFF OF FAMILIES: