Child Care Selection Under Welfare Reform: How Mothers Balance Work Requirements and Parenting

This paper examines the reasoning and experiences of mothers in selecting child care while trying to meet welfare-to-work requirements. Three theoretical positions that have been used to look at child care selection -rational choice, structuralist, and cultural - are examined and critiqued in light of a structural developmental psychology perspective. The paper then reports on semi-structured, open-ended interviews with seven mothers from three different ethnic groups—African- American, Anglo, and Latina—who range in age from 21 to 42. Interviews covered a 15-month period of time following the mothers' enrollment in a welfare- to-work program. The major finding is that mothers have hierarchically ordered criteria for evaluating child care possibilities, and the preeminent criteria is that they trust the child care provider to keep their children safe and well cared for. Structural constraints on the mothers choices are also analyzed. The findings in this article suggest that policy makers should focus on issues of trust and legitimacy of child care providers, as well as on more traditional concerns of supply and educational quality.