Mazzaferro Mateus M, Liu Sihong, Fisher Philip
Stanford University Graduate School of Education, Stanford, CA, United States.
Child Care Health Dev. 2025 May;51(3):e70076. doi: 10.1111/cch.70076.
For families with young children, securing reliable childcare may present a significant challenge. Rising costs, limited resources and the COVID-19 pandemic have heightened the precarity of childcare arrangements. Childcare precarity, defined as a state of insecure or unreliable childcare arrangements while parents work or attend school, reflects unpredictability in family life and early care and education settings and has important implications for families' economic and psychosocial well-being. This study aims at broadening the conceptualization of childcare precarity to include childcare search status and examine its association with caregiver and child emotional distress.
Participants were 3115 caregivers in the United States (88% female, 67% white) who completed the RAPID Survey between November 2022 and December 2023 and reported working or attending school. We assess whether including a childcare search status as an indicator of precarity improves the cross-sectional prediction of caregiver and child emotional distress beyond commonly used indicators (unreliability and disruptions). Using a person-centred approach, we also conduct an exploratory latent class analysis (LCA) to identify distinct experiences of childcare precarity and associated emotional distress.
Childcare unreliability and disruptions were associated with caregiver distress. For children, unreliability was associated with fear/anxiety, while disruptions were associated with fussiness/defiance. Childcare search status was also linked to both caregiver and child emotional distress, improving model fit compared to baseline models. Our exploratory LCA identified a five-class solution as optimal, with emotional distress outcomes varying significantly across classes and correlating with levels of precarity.
Our findings highlight the importance of a multidimensional approach to childcare precarity. Identifying distinct precarity profiles can inform targeted policy interventions to support diverse family needs. Future research should validate these findings and explore the broader impact of early life unpredictability.
对于有幼儿的家庭来说，确保可靠的儿童保育可能是一项重大挑战。成本上升、资源有限以及新冠疫情加剧了儿童保育安排的不稳定性。儿童保育不稳定被定义为父母工作或上学时儿童保育安排不安全或不可靠的状态，反映了家庭生活以及早期保育和教育环境中的不可预测性，对家庭的经济和心理社会福祉具有重要影响。本研究旨在拓宽儿童保育不稳定的概念化范围，将儿童保育寻找状态纳入其中，并考察其与照顾者和儿童情绪困扰的关联。
参与者为3115名美国照顾者（88%为女性，67%为白人），他们在2022年11月至2023年12月期间完成了快速调查，并报告自己正在工作或上学。我们评估将儿童保育寻找状态作为不稳定指标纳入后，是否能在常用指标（不可靠性和中断情况）之外，改善对照顾者和儿童情绪困扰的横断面预测。我们还采用以人为本的方法，进行探索性潜在类别分析（LCA），以识别儿童保育不稳定的不同经历以及相关的情绪困扰。
儿童保育的不可靠性和中断情况与照顾者的困扰相关。对于儿童而言，不可靠性与恐惧/焦虑相关，而中断情况与烦躁/违抗相关。儿童保育寻找状态也与照顾者和儿童的情绪困扰有关，与基线模型相比，改善了模型拟合度。我们的探索性LCA确定五类解决方案为最优方案，情绪困扰结果在不同类别之间有显著差异，且与不稳定程度相关。
我们的研究结果凸显了采用多维方法应对儿童保育不稳定的重要性。识别不同的不稳定状况可以为有针对性的政策干预提供依据，以满足多样化的家庭需求。未来的研究应验证这些发现，并探索早期生活不可预测性的更广泛影响。
