ABSTRACT
The growth in the labor force participation of married, middle-class mothers has made child care a necessity in the US. Today, an unprecedented number of women, with children under the age of 5, are working outside the home, but so are the grandmothers, aunts, and cousins of these children, making informal, extended family-based child care arrangements less available. Add to this the increased geographic mobility of the labor force, and we begin to understand the necessity for the creation and maintenance of formal child care arrangements as fewer working mothers can rely on pre-existing, neighborhood-based child care.
