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Purpose – This study examines parents’ financial stress associated with obtaining care for young children while employed in unstable low-wage jobs. The child care subsidy program aims to both improve child care quality and support employment, and we expect that a substantial infusion of resources into this program would reduce parents’ financial stress.

Methodology/approach – We use a mixed-methods research design to study parents’ financial costs of child care, how predictable the cost of child care is to a parent, and what strategies parents employ to manage child care costs.

Findings – We find that parents perceive the subsidy program essential to their ability to manage the needs of their children and working. Yet, receiving subsidies does not appear to alleviate parents’ financial stress because child care costs continue to consume a large share of the family's income and subsidy policies make it difficult for parents to predict their portion of the costs. Parents manage the large and unpredictable expense of child care by decreasing other expenditures and increasing debt.

Practical implications – Changing subsidy policies so they better fit the reality of these families’ lives could result in a more substantive stress reduction. States can reduce unpredictability by reducing and stabilizing participants’ child care cost burden and revising eligibility policy.

Originality/value of paper – This research project fills an important gap in our knowledge about financial stress of low-income working families, provides insights into the role subsidy program participation plays in these parents’ lives, and informs discussion of subsidy policy.

This article identifies the broad reasons why costs in children's care services might vary, illustrating them with examples from research literature relating to England. An intentionally broad use of ‘costs’ is employed. The literature has been neither systematically nor comprehensively reviewed but does include most of the recent work in the social care field. Articles have been selected to illustrate particular cost associations. This article finds that there is as yet insufficient research into the costs, cost variations or cost‐effectiveness of children's services. However, the findings provide guidance for decision‐makers as they try to understand how resources are currently deployed and why this might be.

The present range and character of child‐care services in Britain have evolved erratically over a long period of time. Structured by a succession of Acts of Parliament, shaped and re‐shaped by the changing pattern of social values, needs and expectations, current provision is both complex and comprehensive. Statutory and voluntary bodies now provide preventive services, shelter and treatment for both the deprived and the delinquent, for the able‐bodied and the handicapped, for infants and for adolescents. Often this care will be provided in the child's own home or in a foster home, but at any one time roughly 40 per cent of the 120,000 children and young persons that are today the responsibility of local authorities will be resident in a children's home.

This article discusses how complexity theory is being used to understand social phenomena. It notes that published articles tend to discuss these ideas in relation to social care without quantification. It demonstrates that there is quantitative evidence that one aspect of complexity thinking, ‘self‐organising criticality’, could be at work in generating children in need in England as defined by the Children Act 1989. The article is based on a secondary analysis of data on the weekly costs of children in need derived from the Children in Need Census 2005. Data were provided by the Department for Children, Schools and Families. It concludes that the distribution of the frequency of weekly cost of children in need shows that a mechanism involving self‐organising criticality may indeed be at work in creating children in need served by local authorities.

The chapter investigates: (1) Do married parents efficiently allocate time to children’s health care? (2) Are parents willing to sacrifice consumption for health improvements at an equal rate for all family members? (3) How does family structure affect health trade-offs parents make? (4) Are parental choices consistent with maximization of a single utility function?

A model is specified focusing on how parents allocate resources between consumption and goods that relieve acute illnesses for family members. Equivalent surplus functions measuring parental willingness to pay to relieve acute illnesses are estimated using data from a stated-preference survey.

Results provide limited support for the prediction that married parents allocate time to child health care according to comparative advantage. Valuations of avoided illness vary between family members and are inconsistent with the hypothesis that fathers’ and mothers’ choices reflect a common utility function.

Prior research on children’s health valuation has relied on a unitary framework that is rejected here. Valuation researchers have focused on allocation of resources between parents and children while ignoring allocation of resources among children, whereas results suggest significant heterogeneity in valuation of health of different types of children and of children in different types of households.

Results may provide a justification on efficiency grounds for policies to provide special protection for children’s health and suggest that benefit–cost analyses of policies affecting health should include separate estimates of the benefits of health improvements for children and adults.

With a global recession impacting employers in most industrialised nations, the management of most large organisations has been forced to trim the number of workers, reduce benefits and in some cases, eliminate entire divisions of their company. A surprising survivor during this difficult period is employer‐provided day care, a relatively new employment benefit that emerged just within the past two decades.

Assesses the extent to which corporate organizations in the US have responded to the working mothers and child care issue. Illustrates, through case studies and examples, how organizations have sponsored or offered financial benefits or provisions to workers; to ease the burden of the financial cost of child care and in so doing maintain a competitive edge by retaining skilled workers. The financial and social implications of the corporate organization as “family caretaker” are also raised for the present as well as for the next century.

This paper proposes a scheme to estimate the technical efficiency at child care centers for the less‐than‐three‐year‐old infants by Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and to manage the quality of care service through implementing flexible and efficient government subsidy system. The result of technical efficiency estimation shows that there exists the heterogeneity in technical efficiency a substantial opportunity for improvement in technical efficiency across child care centers. This result implies that government may bring up the competition by giving subsidy differentially based on efficiency and use the money which has been used inefficiently other purposes. Both can improve the quality of child care service.

Some evidence for the nexus of child care services, labour force participation, fertility, and family income inequality of working mothers in the US is presented in a cause‐effect framework. Based on sample data of 100 SMSAs in 1980, the study finds that the provision of child care services not only increases the labour force participation of working mothers, but it also results in a more equal family income distribution. Its policy implication is that the provision of child care services at an affordable cost and the restructuring of the occupational distribution of women from low paying to higher paying jobs, especially of female‐headed households, may significantly improve the economic welfare of the working poor and their children.