Little research is currently available on child care arrangements involving grandparents, at a time of significant change within the child care sector. This study explored the experiences of grandparents providing regular care of their grandchildren prior to school entry. It used narrative inquiry, a qualitative research methodology to investigate the nature of their care experiences from the perspective of grandparent carers. Narrative tests were gathered through semi-structured interviews with 17 grandparents from a range of socio-economic and cultural backgrounds across Sydney and in south-west NSW, Australia. The active engagement of grandparents in the preparation of interpretive tests enabled significant depth of meaning to be discovered within grandparents' stories. The study revealed the grandparents held contrasting views in relation to their care experience. They gained significant meaning from building strong bonds with grandchildren, while also experiencing loss of autonomy, physical tiredness, and in some cases, family tension. The study found grandparent careers were not a homogenous group and identified four carer clusters grouped around grandparents' perspectives on family contribution, care obligations and personal independence. The study points to the importance of grandparents having choice in care decisions and the need to establish arrangements with adult children that are true care partnerships. / Doctor of Philosphy (PhD)

Interest in child care has grown dramatically, yet little is known about how families manage to ensure appropriate child care. In a secondary analysis of data from 642 employed mothers representing a wide range of income levels, this research identified the factors contributing most to mothers' satisfaction with child care arrangements. The study used an ecological model with accessibility, affordability, quality, and workplace flexibility as characteristics of the exosystem, and household income, presence of a spouse or partner, and age of the youngest child as characteristics of the microsystem. The research explored how individual family characteristics combine with environmental characteristics to impact parental satisfaction. Three questions guided the study: (a) How do accessibility, affordability, quality of child care arrangements, and workplace flexibility affect parental satisfaction with child care arrangements? (b) How do income, household structure, and child's age affect parental satisfaction with child care arrangements? (c) How do these characteristics combine to affect parental satisfaction with child care arrangements? As proposed, the study found that for most mothers in the study, accessibility and quality combine with income and household structure to impact satisfaction with child care arrangements. Poorer women who pay a greater percentage of household income had more concerns about quality and were more dissatisfied with their child care arrangement than women paying a lower percentage of income for care. Despite concerns about quality for mothers paying a greater percentage of income for care, affordability contributed more than quality to satisfaction with child care. The data provided evidence of a different trade-off for lower income families. The results of this study have relevance for policies which address the needs of families at all income levels. The policy principles based on the results of the study include: 1. Basic health and safety regulations are important to quality and stability of care for all parents. 2. Financial assistance with the cost of child care is important, especially for those working families just above the poverty level. 3. Public support of services to improve child care is important to addressing the needs of all employed mothers, regardless of income status. / Graduation date: 1996

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2006. / Title from PDF title page screen. Advisor: Judith Niemeyer; submitted to the School of Education. Includes bibliographical references (p. 195-211).

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of California, Davis, 2002. / Degree granted in Educational Leadership. Joint doctoral program with California State University, Fresno. Includes bibliographical references. Also available via the World Wide Web. (Restricted to UC campuses).

This research employs an anthropological perspective in the examination of the impact upon social workers of changing welfare policies within a fostering and adoption unit in a London Borough. It is a study of the ways in which issues of policy, governance and power affect people on the ground. Nonetheless, this study is very much about the relationships between macro as well as micro processes. For that reason, it includes an illustration of the irreversible shift from the old notions of care, via major reforms to public sector management, and the introduction of market principles into welfare during the 1980s and 1990s. This research also highlights the notion of family and kinship as a set of ideas that are reproduced in government rhetoric about what environment is normal (and what is ideal) for children. In this context, fostering and adoption have become sites for significant and sustained policy legislation over a number of decades. Thus, the fostering and adoption unit offered a unique location for the focus on the fit between the formal specificity of top-down policy upon the day-to-day practices that social workers engage in. In so doing, it reveals how the redefinition of the role of social workers in the twenty-first century results in a tension between notions of professionalism and public sector managerialism. It draws attention to social workers as instruments of government control and intervention, and provides the framework through which to demonstrate the continually changing nature of the identity of social workers in negotiations of power. At the same time, it provides the context for another major strand of government policy legislation for local authorities that are based on the historical discourse of modernisation.

Pathogens on surfaces in child care centers can contribute to illness among attendees and may thereby contribute to medical visits as well. This intervention study was conducted to assess the effect of using specific sanitizing products and cleaning protocols in child care centers on the incidences of lower respiratory infections, diarrheal illness, antibiotic use, and medical visits among children attending the centers and on the levels and antibiotic resistance of indicator bacteria in those centers. During the ten-week study period, children from twelve centers were observed. Six of the centers were randomly assigned to the intervention. The other six were controls. Intervention centers were given cleaning protocols and sanitizing products. Control centers were asked to retain their original procedures and products.Acute illness was determined from records kept by the center directors and telephone calls made to parents of ill children. A call was also made to one randomly selected healthy child's parents for every two ill children recorded. Parents were given a questionnaire requesting information including bedroom sharing status, environmental tobacco smoke exposure, and chronic illnesses.After controlling for within-center clustering and zero-inflation, statistically non-significant trends of reduction were seen in the weeks of lower respiratory infections, diarrheal illness, and medical visits. Multivariable zero-inflated Poisson regression revealed that the number of weeks intervention center children were using antibiotics was 32% lower than among the control center children. This was a statistically significant reduction (95% CI = 0.54-0.86; p = 0.001).Bacterial samples were collected from ten sites within each center at the beginning and the end of the study period to determine the effect of the intervention on the microbial population. The study determined the heterotrophic plate count bacteria numbers and the rates of resistance to ampicillin and cephalothin. Neither heterotrophic bacterial concentrations nor antibiotic resistance rates significantly changed over the course of the study.

Childhood poverty is associated with a range of negative developmental consequences (Brooks-Gunn & Duncan, 1997). Several well-known early childhood intervention programs have demonstrated success in supporting cognitive, language, and behavioural outcomes for children experiencing social disadvantage (Anderson et al., 2003; Barnett, 1995, Ramey & Ramey, 2004). Less known is the impact of naturally occurring centre-based child care programs on developmental outcomes of children living in poverty. A systematic review and meta-analytic inquiry was undertaken to shed light on the potential for child care programs to support developmental outcomes. Of the over 11,000 titles and abstracts reviewed, 226 full documents were subsequently retrieved and reviewed for possible inclusion, and 25 were ultimately included in the in-depth review. The large degree of heterogeneity in and across these studies, reflecting a variety of child care and outcome measures, precluded combination into a single average effect size. A reduced meta-analytic inquiry into the impact of high quality child care on cognitive-linguistic, social, and behavioural outcomes revealed average effect sizes of g=0.41, g=0.37, and g= -0.36 respectively. High quality child care was associated with improved cognitive-linguistic and social outcomes, and reduced behavioural concerns for children from impoverished backgrounds. Collectively, the systematic review, meta-analytic inquiry, and individual effect size data indicates that child care holds the potential to exert a meaningful and positive influence in the lives of children experiencing poverty under conditions of high structural and process quality. Findings are discussed through the lens of Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecology of human development.

This paper looks at the effects of a policy change that Canada’s second largest province implemented. In 1997, Québec chose to implement a 5 dollar-a-day child care program to make access to child care more affordable for individuals in the province. The policy was successful in increasing the female labour force participation (Lefebvre and Merrigan 2008), but studies have shown that there have been negative indirect effects of the policy implementation as well. Baker et al. (2008) show the negative effects of the policy on the behaviour and development of children as well as the lower-quality parental relationships. This paper finds a relationship between the policy change and the divorce and separation rates in the province of Québec. A difference-in-differences approach is used to compare Québec with the rest of Canada and the results show a statistically significant increase in the divorce rate after the policy implementation in Québec.

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