Child-Care Arrangements and Help for Low-Income Families with Young Children

Appropriate and affordable child care is crucial to the well-being of low-income families with young children. To understand the child-care issues these families face, it is important to examine the child-care arrangements they choose and the help they may receive in caring for their children. In this chapter, we present national and state data on the arrangements used by low-income families with young children and on their sources of help with child care. We examine differences by family structure, age of child, across states, and over time. For some issues, we compare low-income families with high-income families.