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What Parents Say About How Childcare Problems Affect Employment and Hours Worked

Abstract: There are about 60 million adults in the United States between the ages of 25 and 54 who live with at least one child under 18 years old. Roughly 50 million of these parents are in the labor force—either employed or actively seeking work—and they represent about 30% of the total U.S. labor force and nearly half of the labor force between the ages 25 to 54. As part of our Spotlight on Childcare and the Labor Market, a targeted effort to understand how access to childcare can affect employment and the economy, we examine these parents’ responses to questions in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS) that ask them, if they are not in the labor force, the main reason they are not seeking a job, and if they are in the labor force, the main reason they work part-time rather than full-time, or the main reason they missed work in the past week, if they are employed but did not work. Collectively we refer to parents citing childcare problems as the main reason for any of these outcomes as “childcare affected.” We use parents’ responses—for two-year periods before, during, and after the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic—to estimate the number of childcare-affected parents in the United States. We show what these estimates imply about the size of the effects of childcare problems on parents’ labor force participation rate and hours worked.

Keywords: Childcare; analysis; labor and demographic economics;

Bibliographic Information

Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Publication Date: 2024-11