Careers in aging: how job-seekers search for and how employers advertise positions in aging-related markets

Given its rapidly-aging population, the U.S. needs a workforce that is informed about and capable of meeting the diverse needs of older adults. Students pursing gerontology education may feel unsure of career opportunities as they enter a job market with traditionally clearly-defined disciplinary backgrounds. The goal of this study was to explore how people currently employed in an aging-related job searched for positions, and how this compared to phrasing used by employers to advertise job openings across several aging-related fields. A web-based survey was administered to employees in aging-related positions, and a search of four job-seeking websites to collect and analyze aging-related job postings was conducted. Most (63%) currently working in the field of aging reported finding their jobs through referral from a friend/colleague or through job search sites or job boards. Out of 493 relevant job postings identified, only 175 of the postings (35%), preferred or required applicants to have some type of aging-related knowledge, skills, training, or prior experience. There may be consequences to not specifically recruiting applicants with aging-related backgrounds: job seekers with qualifications in aging may look for other positions that expressly call for their specialized skills or knowledge, and quality of services and care may be different when provided by persons without such training.     

Where Child Care is Above Average? Licensing, Legislation, and Indicators of Quality of Care in Minnesota

Despite Minnesota's reputation for quality child care, recent changes in legislation and the impact of changing needs have raised concerns about the quality of child care available in the state. This paper presents an overview of Minnesota's current child care system including structural indicators of program quality such as licensing standards, staff wages, turnover, educational level, and program accreditation. The current situation is characterized by high levels of staff turnover, low wages, low levels of program accreditation, and increasing numbers of variances for child care licenses, all of which are disadvantageous to providing high quality child care to Minnesota's children. Efforts to decrease turnover through higher salaries and increase staff educational levels through tuition vouchers are explored. We find that there are a number of ways in which states can support quality child care, but stricter licensing standards are not likely to be sufficient by themselves.     

Providing High-Quality Support Services to Home-Based Child Care: A Conceptual Model and Literature Review

ABSTRACT

Research Findings: Home-based child care accounts for a significant proportion of nonparental child care arrangements for young children in the United States. Yet the early care and education field lacks clear models or pathways for how to improve quality in these settings. The conceptual model presented here articulates the components of high-quality support to child care providers; related factors; and hypothesized provider, family, and child outcomes. The model is based on a literature review of research on home-based child care, home visiting, early childhood mental health consultation, coaching, and family services. We hypothesize that high-quality support to home-based child care that offers relationship-based services focused on quality caregiving (individual home visiting and group supports such as training and networking) and sustainability (materials, equipment, referrals) is most likely to positively impact quality caregiving for children and families. Practice or Policy: Current federal efforts and policy initiatives to increase the supply and quality of infant–toddler child care focus on the development of systems that support home-based providers. The conceptual model of high-quality support described here will inform future program development and research on how to improve quality in home-based child care for the millions of low-income children in these settings.     

Providing medical evaluations for possible child maltreatment to children with special health care needs

OBJECTIVE: Children with special health care needs are known to be at increased risk of all forms of child maltreatment when compared to children without such needs. We describe a health care team's experience providing medical evaluations for suspected child maltreatment to children with special health care needs. METHOD: Consecutive cases seen as outpatients in the Abuse Referral Clinic for Children with Disabilities were abstracted and analyzed. Mail and telephone follow-up contact was attempted after the medical evaluation to determine adherence with treatment recommendations. A subsample of cases for which complete financial information was available was reviewed to determine a reimbursement rate. RESULTS: During the study, 49 children received complete outpatient evaluations. Ages ranged from 3 to 16 years old, and 54% were males. Special needs spanned a wide range of physical, developmental/cognitive and behavioral conditions. The largest number of referrals came from child protective services (42%) followed by referrals from physicians (27%). After the team's comprehensive evaluation, 18% of the children were found to have a history or physical examination that was diagnostic for child maltreatment, 13% were thought to be at high risk, 25% were thought to be at low risk and 44% were thought to have non-abusive etiologies. The collection rate was 14% for an average reimbursement of $38 per case. Only 29 caregivers could be found at follow-up and 22 remembered the recommendations made by the team. Of the 25 cases that were referred for outpatient mental health counseling, 12 (48%) complied. CONCLUSION: Children with a wide range of special health care needs were evaluated in an outpatient special health care needs clinic that offered comprehensive medical evaluations for possible child maltreatment. Medical evaluation services for this group of children were poorly reimbursed. Mental health services were frequently recommended but often not accessed. Child maltreatment teams seeking to serve children with special health care needs will need to plan for service delivery to a potentially diverse group of children and families who may experience difficulty in carrying through on the team's treatment recommendations.     

Who's minding the kids? Experimental evidence on the demand for child care quality

Despite the well-documented benefits of high-quality child care, many preschool-age children in the U.S. attend low-quality programs. Accordingly, improving the quality of child care is increasingly an explicit goal of government policy. However, accomplishing this goal requires a thorough understanding of the factors that influence parents’ child care decisions. This paper provides the first evidence on the demand for child care characteristics in the market for home-based care. Using a randomized audit design, we study three dimensions of caregiving: affordability (i.e., the hourly price of child care), quality (i.e., caregiver education and experience), and convenience (i.e., caregiver car ownership and availability). We find that while parents are extremely sensitive to the cost of child care, they also have strong preferences for quality, particularly caregivers’ educational attainment. Furthermore, we obtain mixed results on the convenience dimensions of child care, with parents valuing those owning a car but not those with more availability. Finally, we find significant heterogeneity in child care preferences according to families’ age of youngest child, race and ethnicity, and willingness-to-pay. Our findings are consistent with the notion that the problem of low-quality in the U.S. child care market may be explained by lack of affordability or the informational resources to identify high-quality care, rather than an undervaluation of such care by parents.     

Decision-making in child protective services: Influences at multiple levels of the social ecology

Decision-making in the child protection system is influenced by multiple factors; agency and geographic contexts, caseworker attributes, and families’ unique circumstances all likely play a role. In this study, we use the second cohort of the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being to explore how these factors are associated with two key case decisions—substantiation and removal to out-of-home care. Analyses are conducted using weighted hierarchical linear models. We find that substantiation is strongly influenced by agency factors, particularly constraints on service accessibility. Substantiation is less likely when agencies can provide services to unsubstantiated cases and when collaboration with other social institutions is high. This supports the concept that substantiation may be a gateway to services in some communities. Agency factors contributed less to the probability of removal among substantiated cases, though time resources and constraints on decision-making had some influence. For both substantiation and removal risks, county, caseworker, and child characteristics were less influential than agency characteristics and family risk factors.     

The effects of universal state pre-kindergarten on the child care sector: The case of Florida's voluntary pre-kindergarten program

Over the past two decades states have drastically increased their investments in pre-kindergarten programs. One major question about state investments in early childhood education programs is to what extent these initiatives create new child care options rather than crowd-out existing private child care options. We investigate this issue using Florida's universal pre-kindergarten program (VPK), a national leader with respect to preschool access, as a case study. Leveraging a 9-year panel of data we find that the introduction of Florida's VPK program expanded the size of the state's licensed child care market by 13% relative to the predicted market size. Using a synthetic control difference-in-difference approach we also show that VPK led to an increase in the percentage of 4-year-olds enrolled in formal care but a drop in the percentage of 3-year-olds enrolled in these settings. Implications are discussed.     

Do child care subsidies influence single mothers’ decision to invest in human capital?

A child care subsidy is one of the most effective policy instruments to facilitate low-income individuals’ transition from welfare to work. Although previous studies consistently find that subsidy receipt is associated with increased employment among single mothers, there is currently no evidence on the influence of these benefits on the decision to invest in human capital. Using data from the Kindergarten cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, this paper examines the impact of child care subsidy receipt on the likelihood of engaging in education and job training activities. We identify the impact of subsidy receipt by exploiting plausibly exogenous geographic variation in the distance that parents must travel from home in order to reach the nearest social service agency that administers the subsidy application process. Results suggest that child care subsidies encourage single mothers to engage in human capital investment. In particular, our instrumental variables estimates imply that subsidy receipt increases the likelihood that a single mother enrolls in courses at a school or university by 13 percentage points and participates in a job training program by 8 percentage points.     

Does a paradox exist in child well-being risks among foreign-born Latinos,U.S.-born Latinos,and Whites? Findings from 50 California cities

Past research has identified “paradoxes” in infant health and child welfare services involvement, whereby children of Latinos and immigrants often demonstrate better health and decreased risk for child protective services involvement when compared to whites of similar socioeconomic position. This population-based study examined whether a paradox exists among immigrant and U.S.-born Latino caregivers in the prevalence and magnitude of risks to child well-being when compared to whites of similar socioeconomic position. Data were drawn from a random, general population telephone survey of parenting practices in 50 California cities (n = 2,259), which was administered in English and Spanish. The sample included 1,625 U.S.-born whites (72.0%), 351 U.S.-born Latinos (15.5%) and 283 foreign-born Latino respondents (12.5%). After adjusting for covariates in logistic regression models stratified by household income, immigrant caregivers in lower income households reported odds of insufficient food for the child that were 12 times as large as those for whites (OR 11.97, 95% CI 2.87, 49.86); odds of reported inability to take the child to the doctor and leaving a child in a place of questionable safety were nearly eight times as large (OR 7.92, 95% CI 2.38, 26.36 and OR 7.93, 95% CI 1.73, 36.46 respectively). These relationships were attenuated or insignificant for immigrant caregivers in households with greater resources. Therefore, a paradoxical relationship between socioeconomic position and risks to child well-being was not identified. Further research is needed to better understand the complex relationships between such risks, child health, and child protective services involvement.     

Family,child and location factors and parents’ reasons for multiple concurrent childcare arrangements in the years before school in Australia

Research suggests that multiple non-parental care arrangements may have adverse effects on young children, yet little is known about their prevalence, factors associated with their use, or parents’ reasons for making these care arrangements. This longitudinal study reports on 677 children and their families recruited from government-regulated child care centers and family child care services in urban and rural New South Wales, Australia. Multiple concurrent care arrangements were relatively common, with one third of children attending at least two child care arrangements per week. Multiple child care was found to be more likely for children who were older, with better health, or with employed mothers, and who were living in rural rather than urban areas. Results suggest that parents’ reasons for using multiple care arrangements were based largely based on preferences that were made in the best interests of the child and on convenience. The deliberate choice by parents to use multiple child care arrangements to benefit their child challenges the assumption in previous literature that mixed care is not the parents’ first choice.     

Child labour and educational success in Portugal

The current debate on child labour focuses on developing countries. However, Portugal is an example of a relatively developed country where child labour is still a matter of concern as between 8% and 12% of Portuguese children may be classified as workers. This paper studies the patterns of child labour in Portugal and assesses the consequences of working on the educational success of Portuguese children. The analysis controls for typically unobserved attributes such as a child's interest in school and educational ambitions and uses geographical variation in policies designed to tackle child labour and in labour inspection regimes to instrument child labour. We find that economic work hinders educational success, while domestic work does not appear to be harmful. Furthermore, after controlling for a host of socio-economic variables, factors such as a child's interest in school and educational ambitions have a large effect on boosting educational success and reducing economic work.     

Teasing apart the child care conundrum: A factorial survey analysis of perceptions of child care quality, fair market price and willingness to pay by low-income, African American parents

Child care quality plays a crucial role in children's social and cognitive development. While child care quality is a critical issue for all children, it matters more for low-income children. Policy makers have increased the emphasis on allowing parents, not government, to make decisions about the type of care they want for their children. Yet most research on child care quality has focused on how child care professionals, not parents define high quality care. This study investigates how low-income families evaluate child care quality by examining the child care preferences of a sample of low-income African American parents. We employ the factorial survey method, a method used in sociological research to assess people's perceptions and rankings of individual attributes associated with complex multidimensional phenomena. The factorial survey method permits a simultaneous assessment of how respondents evaluate and make tradeoffs among multiple child care characteristics. We assess the impact of child care characteristics on respondents’ perceptions of child care desirability, fair market value, and willingness to pay. Findings indicate that parents’ definition of quality focused squarely on the care giving environment, specifically the qualifications, experience, training and behavior associated with the child care provider. The type of care facility—family, center, relative or neighbor care was largely irrelevant to this sample of parents. Parents believed that the characteristics they defined as desirable child care situations were worth more, and parents were willing to pay more for these characteristics. These parents also defined quality in terms of race and class, and they wanted racial and economic diversity. This research suggests parents may choose lower quality care, not because they do not know what quality is or because they define quality care differently, but because such care may be neither available nor affordable in their communities.     

Demands and Job Resources in the Child Care Workforce: Swiss Lead Teacher and Assistant Teacher Assessments

Center-based child care has been struggling with poor health and high turnover rates of child care staff and their adverse impact on care quality for decades. Yet little is known about personal and structural antecedents of job resources and job demands that are valid predictors of health and turnover in the child care workforce. Research Findings: This study investigated job resources and job demands among child care staff of different education levels (491 lead teachers and 310 assistant teachers) from Switzerland. Results from t-tests and hierarchical regression analyses indicated slightly higher job resources and job demands for lead teachers than for assistant teachers but similar antecedents of job resources and job demands. Overall, center characteristics shaped job resources and job demands more strongly than staff characteristics. More specifically, job resources were predicted by structural characteristics associated with professionalism in child care work, whereas job demands were primarily dependent on adequate staffing. Practice or Policy: The findings suggest that center characteristics (e.g., work environment and staffing levels) should be targeted in order to increase job resources and reduce job demands, which would in turn promote health and lower turnover rates among child care staff.     

Child care arrangements for toddlers and preschoolers: Are they different for youngest children?

Many extant studies on the use of non-parental child care are based on data from the youngest child in the household. To date, it has not been addressed whether this approach introduces bias. We present reasons why child care arrangements for youngest children may differ from those of same-age older children and examine whether the use of child care, type of arrangement, and use of care in combination with mother's employment differ for youngest versus middle/oldest toddlers and preschoolers with data from the 1999 National Household Education Survey. We find that youngest preschoolers are more likely to attend child care on a regular basis than middle/oldest preschoolers. Further, youngest toddlers and preschoolers are more likely than middle/oldest toddlers and preschoolers to have an employed mother. How families combine the use of child care and maternal employment differs by birth order. Controlling for other child and household characteristics does not explain these differences. Differences in the types of care arrangements used for youngest versus middle/oldest toddlers and preschoolers in non-parental care do not reach statistical significance.     

The Changing Practitioner Role in Early Childhood Centres: multiple shifts and contradictory forces

This article focuses on the role profile of early childhood practitioners against a background of multiple shifts in the social context and socio‐political climate of early childhood education and care. Mechanisms of change include the unification of the two former German states, new legislation on child and youth services, the reform of steering systems at a local government level and an increasing marketisation and deregulation of services. Practitioners are potential key links in the process of repositioning early childhood centres in the current ‘quality debate’. The need for a newly defined role profile which effectively combines a more family‐centred approach towards young children's learning biographies and a more community‐centred focus on multicultural networking systems is discussed. Practitioners find themselves at the heart of simultaneous and contradictory change forces which may be perceived as a threat, or as a chance to raise the political status of early childhood education and care in the public domain and to reconstruct their own professional self‐image.     

Some cultural and economic factors leading to neglect, abuse and violence in respect of children within the family in Sri Lanka

The paper provides an overview of the present position. It attempts to identify the causational factors in situations of child neglect, abuse and violence and to pinpoint areas where there is a lacuna in information and knowledge. The study takes prevalence of abandoned children, failure to meet a child's basic needs and underutilization of services provided free by the state as indices of neglect. Measured in these terms it seems that though in Sri Lanka children are considered a blessing, yet they are also subject to neglect though this is not deliberate on the part of parents but arising from numerous factors, mainly poverty and ignorance. Other influences also operate such as cultural values and weaknesses in the delivery systems. Today females of all socioeconomic levels seek employment, both locally and abroad. This can lead to child neglect since community services for child care are inadequate and traditional help is dwindling. The negative impact on children of certain aspects of modernization is also considered. Abuse of children manifests itself mainly in child domestic labour and the exploitation, particularly of malformed and diseased children, in the trade of begging. Violence as judged by reported cases is minimal. But considering social attitudes regarding physical punishment, its prevalence may be wider than generally believed. The need for statistics and studies on all aspects of child care and child behaviour have come out in the study.     

Suburban legend: School cutoff dates and the timing of births

Many states require children to reach age 5 by a specified date in the calendar year in order to begin kindergarten. We use birth certificate records from 1999 to 2004 to assess whether parents systematically time childbirth before these eligibility cutoff dates to capture the option value of sending their child to school at a relatively young age, thereby avoiding a year of child care costs. Testing for discontinuities in the distribution of births around cutoff dates, we find no evidence that the option value influences the timing of birth. Similarly, we find no systematic discontinuities in average mothers’ characteristics or babies’ health outcomes around cutoff dates. Timing in the neighborhood of eligibility cutoffs occurs only when the cutoffs coincide with weekends or holidays, which may have implications for recent research that assumes birth dates in the neighborhood of cutoffs are essentially randomly assigned.     

Who is out of school? Evidence from the Statistics South Africa Community Survey

The South Africa Schools Act requires every child to “attend school from the first school day of the year in which such learner reaches the age of seven years until the last day of the year in which such learner reaches the age of 15 years or the ninth grade, whichever comes first” (Republic of South Africa, 1996). This paper addresses three questions in relation to this. First, to what extent has this legal requirement been met? Second, what are the trends in relation to achieving universal access to compulsory education? And third, what are the factors related to and characteristics of those learners of compulsory school age who are not attending? To address these questions, we have made use of the Statistics South Africa dataset, Community Survey 2007. Our analysis suggests that the size of the compulsory age population who are not attending school may be slightly higher than some government sources have suggested. The trend associated with access remains consistent, with the only major change over the past 10 years being the improved levels of enrolment of six and seven year old children. With regard to the factors related to and the characteristics of children who are not attending school, our analysis reveals that certain sub-populations have higher non-attendance ratios: coloured boys; children whose parents, particularly mothers, have died; children born outside South Africa; children who have moved in the past five years; children with disabilities; and children living in some specific rural communities. A number of broad but interrelated factors may account for children not being in school: disability; family structure; children living in households that are eligible for social grants but are not receiving them; and geographic and racial characteristics. To be poor in South Africa may mean exclusion from the mainstream of the economy, but it does not necessarily mean exclusion from access to basic state services like enrolment in schooling or social grants. Children not attending are not only likely to be living in households that are excluded from participation in the mainstream economy, but are also on the fringes of state services; they may also be on the fringes of households. The paper concludes with recommendations for further research to identify reasons why children in these vulnerable sub-populations are less likely to be enrolled.     

Variation in teenage mothers' experiences of child care and other components of welfare reform: selection processes and developmental consequences

Developmental evaluations of the current wave of welfare reform programs present challenges with regard to (1) assessing child outcomes; (2) accounting for heterogeneity among low-income families in both baseline characteristics and involvement in self-sufficiency activities and supports, and (3) development of alternatives to experimental approaches to causal inference. This study (N = 1,079) addresses these challenges by examining effects on 4- to 6-year-old children of different patterns of child care, self-sufficiency activities, and other service utilization indicators among experimental-group mothers in a 16-site welfare reform program. Outcomes in areas of cognitive ability and behavior problems were investigated. The study identified seven subgroups of participants engaging in different patterns of service utilization and activity involvement. A two-stage simultaneous equation methodology was used to account for selection, and effects on child cognitive ability of participation in specific patterns of services and activities were found. For example, children of mothers characterized by high levels of involvement in center-based child care, education, and job training showed higher levels of cognitive ability than children of mothers in groups characterized by high involvement in center-based care and education, or center-based care and job training. In addition, children of mothers in groups with high levels of involvement in any of these activities showed higher levels of cognitive ability than those with low levels of involvement. The bulk of selection effects occurred through site-level differences, rather than family-level socio-economic status or maternal depression indicators. Implications for welfare reform program and policy concerns are discussed.     

A selective study of child mortality

Identification of children's deaths from abuse and neglect is a complex process, thus no one individual should have the sole responsibility for this identification. A team could best carry out the comprehensive, interdisciplinary investigation and evaluation that the process requires.While at the present time, prevention of child abuse is a high priority item; before we invest large sums of public and private money and manpower in a variety of supportive services, some fundamental issues need to be addressed. We ought to do a more thorough job of trying to find out how many infants and children are dying of abuse. Second, we ought to open our minds to the fact that even more children are dying of neglect. When we do a better job of identifying these tragic phenomena, we will also be arriving at better preventive methods.We cannot prevent what we know so little about.