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December 1983, Vol. 106, No. 12

Child-care services:
a national picture

Sheila B. Kamerman

In 1983, for the first time, half of all mothers with children under age 6 were in the labor force.¹  Out of a cohort of 19.0 million children under age 6, 47 percent had working mothers. In the near future, the majority of preschoolers will very likely have working mothers, as most school-age children already do. How preschool children are cared for while their mothers work is something that relatively little is known about, although what is known suggests a quite complicated picture.

What is the picture today of child-care services for preschool aged children? To help the reader visualize the picture, four questions are addressed:

• Where are the children of working parents being cared for?
• What is known about the kinds of child-care services and arrangements that now exist?
• What is known about the quality if care now provided and what is happening to it?
• What are the current trends, developments, and emerging issues in the child-care services field?

For the purpose of this article, child-care services will include: family day care and center care, public and private nursery school and prekindergartens, Head Start centers, all-day care, part-day care, and after-school care. (Non-monetized care by relatives and brief, occasional babysitting are not included.) The discussion is about relatively regular care or attendance: a specific number of hours per day and regular days per week of provision—in families and group arrangements—under both educational and social welfare auspices.

This excerpt is from an article published in the December 1983 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.

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1 Elizabeth Waldman, "Labor force statistics from a family perspective," Monthly Labor Review, December 1983, pp. 14-18.

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Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey

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