Winnipeg is a city with high rates of child poverty, a high Aboriginal population, and a chronic shortage of childcare spaces. Some neighbourhoods have more and better services than others – yet all areas of the city have long waiting lists for childcare services. In some municipal wards, prospective parent users will face a delay of between one and four years for a childcare space. This thesis interrogates the distribution of childcare spaces and childcare waitlists throughout the city, showing how waitlists and services systematically differ between more and less affluent wards, and by wards with higher and lower percentages of Aboriginal families. These findings are particularly important for public policy. Manitoba has developed a new on-line centralized registration and waitlist system that was launched in Brandon, Manitoba in the fall of 2010. The provincial government has declared it will use this centralized data to guide the funding and expansion of new childcare services. A close examination of waitlist and services in Winnipeg, however, strongly predicts an unintended outcome: rather than promoting more and better access to childcare services, the provincial registration and waitlist strategy is more likely to result in a further maldistribution of access and service, reproducing an existing socio-economic gradient that particularly disadvantages Aboriginal and low-income parents.

Winnipeg is a city with high rates of child poverty, a high Aboriginal population, and a chronic shortage of childcare spaces. Some neighbourhoods have more and better services than others – yet all areas of the city have long waiting lists for childcare services. In some municipal wards, prospective parent users will face a delay of between one and four years for a childcare space. This thesis interrogates the distribution of childcare spaces and childcare waitlists throughout the city, showing how waitlists and services systematically differ between more and less affluent wards, and by wards with higher and lower percentages of Aboriginal families. These findings are particularly important for public policy. Manitoba has developed a new on-line centralized registration and waitlist system that was launched in Brandon, Manitoba in the fall of 2010. The provincial government has declared it will use this centralized data to guide the funding and expansion of new childcare services. A close examination of waitlist and services in Winnipeg, however, strongly predicts an unintended outcome: rather than promoting more and better access to childcare services, the provincial registration and waitlist strategy is more likely to result in a further maldistribution of access and service, reproducing an existing socio-economic gradient that particularly disadvantages Aboriginal and low-income parents.

Thesis advisor: Rebekah Levine Coley / One in eight children in the U.S. live in an immigrant Latino family. The contexts common to their families include accumulated disadvantages that result in diminished educational attainment. High quality early childhood education (ECE) is increasingly seen as a cost-effective intervention that can mitigate negative educational outcomes for children, yet research has found that Latino immigrant families have lower utilization rates of center-based care, often associated with high quality, than other racial and ethnic counterparts. This research study aimed to better understand the ECE decision-making process of Latino foreign-born parents with children ages 3 to 5 through an examination of the accommodation model to develop a culturally-informed model that delineates family and community characteristics, parental preferences and perceived opportunities and constraints that relate to ECE selection for this population. This aim was addressed through a two phase, mixed methods study. Through group interviews with twenty-two Latino immigrant parents across four communities in the Greater New York City metropolitan area, Phase 1 sought to explore the decision-making process through which such parents pursue ECE decisions for their young children. Thematic analysis informed by grounded-theory identified seven themes central to these families: beliefs about development and parental goals, “cara vemos, corazon no sabemos”/trusting providers, understanding of ECE, perceived context of reception, informed preferences, opportunities and constraints, and evaluating ECE. The resulting culturally-informed model highlights the ways that the culturally-bounded contexts common to Latino immigrant families inform their mental representations of available ECE choices, parental beliefs and socialization goals, and social context to create a set of informed preferences that guide their decision-making. These findings highlight the importance of maternal employment and parental beliefs about development in constraining parent’s informed preferences and ECE choice. Phase 2 aimed to test the overall integrity of the culturally-informed model of decision-making and assesses its prediction of Latino immigrant parents’ ECE selection. Data were drawn from the Household and Center-based Surveys of the 2012 National Survey of Early Care and Education, with data on 744 children ages 3 to 5 years in Latino immigrant families. Measures from parent reports and administrative data operationalized six of the themes found in the first phase. Findings from multinomial logistic regression analyses found that maternal employment and child age moderated components of the model and ECE selection. Results also highlight the importance of culturally-bounded contexts of the ECE decision-making process of Latino immigrant families. Findings from each phase were compared through side-by-side analysis for convergence. Implications for future research, policy and the field are discussed. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology.

The focus of the thesis is the exploration of young children’s routine childcare arrangements and the role played by childcare policy provisions (in cash, in time and in kind, through services) in shaping these arrangements in the Romanian context. Through the narratives of 68 family carers in 37 urban and rural Romanian households in multi-ethnic Transylvania, the study investigates the household level processes whereby young children’s care arrangements come to be and explores the ways in which the design of and access to childcare policy provisions might shape young children’s routine care arrangements. In doing so, the thesis reconceptualises the term childcare arrangements and provides a descriptive account of ten different routine arrangements for the care of young children. Through an inductive analysis of carer narratives, the thesis also develops a heuristic tool – hierarchies of care ideals – that lies at the heart of a refined explanatory framework pertaining to the conception and implementation of individual care arrangements. This framework complements existing analytic models that have been developed to explain mothers’ employment and care related decisions during their children’s early years. Building on this inductively developed framework, the thesis expands on the role that different childcare policy provisions were said to play in shaping households’ childcare choices. The thesis reveals that the designs of policy provisions and households’ access to different benefits directly shape young children’s care arrangements. Furthermore, through the analysis of narrative pairs available for most households in the study, the thesis explores the gendered ways in which mothers and fathers narratively constructed agency in relation to decision-making about children’s care arrangements. Finally, the thesis proposes three real-type decision-making models described by carers in the study, revealing the dynamic nature of household decision-making in relation to children’s care arrangements.

There is an unexplained gap in employment between native-born and foreign-born women in most European countries and it is not evident how it can be closed. This essay studies some possible explanations of the gap by looking at the effect of childcare costs and integration policies, through regression analysis. The individual effects are not significant, but the results do however give some indication that the degree of integration policies in a country can change the effect of welfare policies such as childcare.

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Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Hotel, Restaurant, Institution Management and Dietetics / Elizabeth B. Barrett / This research developed a model to assess beliefs and perceptions of employees about following a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) -based food safety program in Childcare Centers. The four Health Belief Model constructs included perceived susceptibility, severity, benefits, and barriers. Because of their proven worth in behavioral research, the constructs behavioral intention and self-efficacy were added to the model. An instrument designed to test the model was mailed to directors and foodservice employees at accredited Childcare Centers in six Midwestern states (n = 528). The final response rate was 17.5 percent. Self-efficacy was tested as a moderator between the independent variables and behavioral intentions. Exploratory factor analysis identified factors. Most items loaded as expected, but the construct perceived severity loaded on two factors requiring an additional factor in the model. The final factor names included perceived susceptibility, center consequences, child consequences, perceived benefits, perceived barriers, self-efficacy, and behavioral intentions. The model accounted for 70.07% of the variance for a six-factor model. Perceived benefits and self-efficacy significantly affected behavioral intentions to follow a HACCP-based food safety program. In addition, self-efficacy had a moderating effect on the relationship between perceived benefits and behavioral intentions. Results indicated that directors and foodservice employees understood that children are susceptible to foodborne illnesses. However, they did not believe that a foodborne illness could occur at their Center, and if it did, there would be no consequences to themselves or the Center. Improved construct items need to be developed and tested utilizing a population that has more knowledge about HACCP-based food safety programs. This model should be tested with other populations that are familiar with HACCP-based food safety programs to determine if perceived susceptibility, severity, or barriers have an impact on behavioral intentions to follow a HACCP-based food safety program. Once beliefs and perceptions about food safety practices and behaviors are identified, interventions can be tailored to address specific misconceptions resulting in improved food safety practices and behaviors.