CeitYist

25/01/2022

College students with young kids – especially mothers – find themselves in a time crunch
The big idea
We found that college students who have children had significantly less time for college than their childless peers – about 4.3 hours less per week, to be specific – and that this “time poverty” is greatest for mothers of preschool-age children. That’s according to a 2021 study of 11,195 U.S. college students.

Our study found other trends as well. Student parents also often had to care for children while they were studying. The most “time-poor” parents sacrificed a great deal more of their free time for their studies than childless students who had more time and could complete an academic degree more rapidly.

Among all student parents, those with the youngest children – and mothers in particular – had the least time for college and were likelier to enroll in college part time.“ For example, parents with children less than a year old spent a higher proportion of their free time – time left over after all necessary tasks – on their education than any other group. This was perhaps an attempt to make up for the fact that they had less time for their studies.

In addition, despite having less available time for their studies in the first place, mothers on average spent more time on their education than fathers. For example, among parents with children ages 1-5, mothers had 8.4 fewer hours per week to spend on their studies than fathers with children of the same age. Still, these mothers spent almost two more hours per week on their education than fathers.

Why it matters
This time difference matters, because college students with children are more likely to drop out and take longer to complete their degrees than college students without children, even though on average they have higher GPAs, according to a study we published in 2018.

In our 2021 study, having less time for college explained much of the difference in time spent on education between college students who have children and those who don’t, as well as between mothers and fathers. It also explained differences among these groups in part-time enrollment.

However, mothers and fathers who lived with other adult family members who could help with child care were able to devote more time to their college work. They also spent less time studying while simultaneously caring for children, and they enrolled in college full time more often. Each additional adult family member living with a student parent increased the time they spent on their studies by over 1.5 hours each week. It also increased the time student parents spent studying without children present by 5 percentage points and their probability of enrolling full time by over 2 percentage points. This suggests that access to child care is critical to the progress of student parents.

Improving outcomes for student parents is important not just for students but for their families. One reason for this is that achieving a college degree is linked to better economic and educational outcomes for their children.

What still isn’t known
We don’t yet know which kinds of supports might work best to improve outcomes for college students who are parents, but there are several potential solutions.

On-campus child care at colleges in the U.S. currently serves only about 5% of student parents’ needs and has declined over the last several decades.

One possible approach could be to invest more systematically in on-campus child care centers at colleges to support student parents. Another approach could be to increase federal financial aid awards to automatically cover the costs of child care that student parents need in order to study or attend class.

What’s next
Time poverty may be a challenge also for students who are not parents. Currently, we are looking at time poverty rates for other groups, such as students who enroll in online courses, women and students of color, to explore the extent to which time poverty is unequally distributed, and whether it may explain inequitable college outcomes for these groups. This may help us to understand whether different groups finish college at different rates because of differences in how much time they have to devote to their studies.

25/01/2022

About 1 in 3 child care workers are going hungry
Of the nearly 1 million child care workers in the United States, in a recent white paper, my colleagues and I found that 31.2% – basically 1 out of every 3 – experienced food insecurity in 2020, the latest year for which we analyzed data. Food insecurity means there is a lack of consistent access to enough food. This rate of food insecurity is anywhere from 8 to 20 percentage points higher than the national average.

In Washington state and Texas, one study found 42% of child care workers experienced food insecurity, with 20% of child care workers experiencing very high food insecurity. High food insecurity is when a person reports reduced quality and variety of diet. Very high food insecurity occurs when a person reports disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.

Another study in Arkansas found that 40% of child care workers experienced food insecurity.

Effects of food insecurity
People who are food insecure are at increased chances of being poor health, with conditions like hypertension, diabetes, asthma, arthritis and depression, among other chronic diseases and health conditions.

Low wages and food insecurity may contribute to child care workers’ high stress levels. When child care workers experience stress, they tend to reduce the amount of positive attention to children and increase their punitive responses to children’s challenging behavior.

Causes of food insecurity
Overall, child care workers’ wages are low, with the median hourly wage being $12.24 per hour. This means child care workers make little more than fast-food workers, whose median pay is $11.64 per hour. What child care workers make is not considered a living wage.

As a result of low wages, more than 53% of child care workers received public assistance, including Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program from 2014 to 2016. This compares with the 21% of elementary and middle school teachers who received public assistance in that period. When so many child care workers rely on public assistance, it reveals how many of them don’t make enough money to get by.

Nearly all U.S. child care workers are women, and half are people of color. This workforce is central to providing high-quality early childhood education to children up to 5 years old.

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Early childhood researchers and policymakers have focused on increasing the education and training of the child care workforce to bolster quality. The Center for the Study of Child Care Employment recommends that lead teachers, the primary teachers in early childhood classrooms who are responsible for day-to-day management of a classroom, at least have a bachelor’s degree and that assistant teachers at least have a child development associate certificate or equivalent. Despite the fact that the more education child care workers have the higher-quality care they deliver, many states require only a high school diploma or equivalent, and some states do not have any education requirements for entry-level positions.

On average, child care workers who have a bachelor’s degree do make more than those who don’t. However, going to college doesn’t pay off as much for child care workers as it does for those in other fields. Child care workers with a bachelor’s degree average $14.70 per hour, which is just under half the average earnings overall of those with a bachelor’s degree – $27 per hour.

It’s one thing to expect child care workers to get more education to become better at what they do. But it is also important to ensure that additional education pays off.

Policymakers have recently focused on child care workers’ wages. For example, the Build Back Better legislation would raise payment rates to meet the cost of care for children from birth to 5 years old. The cost of care would include wages.

25/01/2022

The sunsetting of the child tax credit expansion could leave many families without enough food on the table
The big idea
The discontinuation of the Biden administration’s monthly payments of the child tax credit could leave millions of American families without enough food on the table, according to our new study in JAMA Network Open. The first missed payment on Jan. 15, 2022, left families that had come to rely on them wondering how they would make ends meet, according to many news reports.

The American Rescue Plan Act, a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package passed in March 2021, made significant changes to the existing child tax credit. It increased the size of the credit by 50% or more, depending on a child’s age, to either $3,000 or $3,600 per year. It also made more low-income families eligible and paid half of this money out as a monthly “advance” payment.

Biden’s Build Back Better plan calls for a second year of an expanded child tax credit disbursed monthly. But that package of measures stalled in the Senate after passing the House in November 2021. As a result, the monthly advance payments of the child tax credit that American families with children had been receiving since July 2021 were left hanging in the balance.

Nearly 60 million families with children received the first payment, which was sent out in July 2021. The payments were widely credited with bringing about huge declines in poverty and malnutrition. Our study found that the introduction of these advance payments was associated with a 26% drop in the share of American households with children without enough food.

We used nationally representative data from over 585,000 responses to the Census Household Pulse Survey from January through August 2021 to assess how the introduction of the child tax credit advance payments affected food insufficiency in the weeks following the first payment on July 15, 2021. Food insufficiency is a measure of whether a household has enough food to eat. It is a much narrower measure than food insecurity, which is a more comprehensive measure based on 18 questions used by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Importantly, we were able to separate the effect of these payments from other types of support, like the use of food pantries, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, unemployment benefits and COVID-19 stimulus payments.

Why it matters
Food insufficiency spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly among families with children: It rose from 3% among all households in December 2019 to 18% in December 2020. Even after many, if not most, U.S. families received pandemic stimulus checks and other benefits, food insufficiency still hovered around 14% in June 2021. But following the first advance payment, from July 23 to August 2, 2021, food insufficiency among households with children fell drastically, to 10%.

This support is ending just as the omicron variant of COVID-19 is leaving many families without work, child care and, in many places, child care via in-person instruction at school.

All these factors are leading to lower income and, where school is virtual once again, creating the need for more meals at home. Other analyses of the Census Household Pulse Survey have found that most families were using the child tax credit advance payments for food and other necessities, such as housing and utilities.

What’s next
We are going to look further into how the advance payments affected low-income families through the rest of 2021, analyzing which groups of Americans saw the most benefit and what happened once the advance payments expired in 2022.

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The full impact of the expansion of the child tax credit for the 2021 tax year has not yet been seen either. Eligible families will get the rest of that money, equal to all six monthly payments combined, when they file their 2021 tax returns this year.

25/01/2022

25/01/2022