The child care conundrum : the costs and consequences of unmet early child care needs among parents working at academic institutions across the United States
Name
1140071619-MIT.pdf
Size
11.99 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
52aa240b6fbe3ddf536563852af90986
Author(s)
Vaghul, Kavya.
Advisor(s)
Mariana Arcaya.
Alternative Title
Costs and consequences of unmet early child care needs among parents working at academic institutions across the United States
Date Issued
2019
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Cities across the United States are saddled with a burgeoning child care conundrum, a mismatch between the skyrocketing need for child care and the fundamental insufficiency of child care infrastructure and policies to address the growing demand. To be sure, the broken child care market -- characterized by too few spots, mediocre quality, and exorbitant costs -- forces parents to make tradeoffs in order to fully meet their child care needs. These tradeoffs not only perpetuate deep-seated gender inequalities and compromise family economic security, but they also have broader social and economic consequences. Though research shows that large public investments could go a long way in fixing the child care conundrum and its pernicious effects, current political gridlock has hindered efforts to create universal child care programs and policies. In the absence of large public investments in child care, this thesis builds a case for local employers and institutions to be held accountable for filling the early child care needs of their workforce. One such employer primed to tackle the child care conundrum is the American academe. I use the results of an original online survey of parents working, teaching, researching, or studying in academia with a child under the age of five to develop a deterministic model that quantifies the total cost of unmet child care needs to academic parents and academic institutions. The findings suggest that a variety of small investments in child care by academic institutions could generate substantial savings for parents and institutions alike, contribute to local economic development, and set the stage for innovative child care policy.
Description
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Thesis: M.C.P., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2019
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 200-216).
Subjects
Urban Studies and Planning.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Terms of Use
MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.
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