As women increasingly entered the labor force throughout the late 20th century, the challenges of balancing work and family came to the forefront. We leverage pronounced changes in the availability of public schooling for young children--through duration expansions to the kindergarten day--to better understand mothers' and families' constraints.…

This article addresses the interplay between motherhood and working as a professional educator. It focuses on female educators' relationships in the public sphere and private sphere, and how these two spheres inform and impact one another. The research aims to establish the degree and extent to which societal dictates affect women's identities in…

This qualitative study aimed to compare the scientific process skills of 5-6 years old preschool children in kindergartens where Reggio Emilia approach was implemented and not implemented. For this purpose, upon obtaining consent forms from the parents, in total 80 purposefully selected children participated in the study; 35 in a kindergarten…

This article unpacks ECE professional associations and unions (ECEPAUs) pathways of resistance to a 'Universal Nursery Policy Project' (UNPP) and how ECEPAUs have reconceptualized the professionalism of the nursery within the Chilean neoliberal agenda. Drawing on a post-qualitative methodology, with three datasets of participant observations,…

This study assessed the links between early maternal employment and children's later academic and behavioral skills in Australia and the United Kingdom. Using representative samples of children born in each country from 2000 to 2004 (Australia N = 5,093, U.K. N = 18,497), OLS regression models weighted with propensity scores assessed links between…

While the benefits of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services to better learning are now widely acknowledged, a widespread and accessible provision for these services also helps support gender equality in the workforce. In particular, the availability, intensity, reliability and affordability of ECEC play an important role in engaging…

This paper assesses the impact of welfare reform's parental work requirements on low-income children's cognitive and social-emotional development. The identification strategy exploits an important feature of the work requirement rules--namely, age-of-youngest-child exemptions--as a source of quasi-experimental variation in first-year maternal…

In his 2013 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama made a historic pledge to provide universal, high-quality pre-K education to the nation's children. Early childhood education has myriad benefits, including better, more equitable long-term outcomes for children of divergent economic backgrounds Moreover, investments in these programs…

Many argue that childcare costs limit the labor supply of mothers, though existing evidence has been mixed. Using a child's eligibility for public kindergarten in a regression discontinuity instrumental variables framework, I estimate how use of a particular subsidy, public school, affects maternal labor supply. I find public school enrollment…

Since the mid-1960s, many state governments have introduced subsidies for school districts that offer kindergarten. This paper uses the staggered timing and age targeting of these grants to examine how the childcare subsidy implicit in public schooling affects maternal labor supply. Using data from five Censuses, I estimate that four of ten single…

Families across the United States must routinely make difficult choices about child care arrangements because of the need to resume a job, continue an education or training program, or care for other family members. Leaving children in the care of others for the first time can be difficult (Sayer, Bianchi, & Robinson, 2004; Van Horn, Ramey,…

With increasing numbers of women joining the workforce, there is a need for quality childcare. This project, conducted in Japan and using a large number of participants, sought to standardize an evaluation scale to measure the development of children. The development of children under six years of age (N = 22,819) who are enrolled in childcare…

This study examined the use of multiple, concurrent, nonparental child-care arrangements among children under 5 with employed mothers in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N= 759). Older children, those primarily cared for in informal child care, those living in cohabitating or single-parent households, and those whose…

This paper summarizes recent evidence from a series of evaluations of family self-sufficiency programs. These studies show that policies can be successful in achieving both positive economic benefits for parents (such as increased employment) and positive educational effects on their children. It need not be the case that increasing mothers' work…

This report presents data on the school readiness of children in the United States as reported by their parents. This report incorporates basic demographic information about the children, parent/guardian characteristics, and household characteristics. These data come from the School Readiness Survey (SR) of the 2007 National Household Education…