Family Day Care in the United States: Parent Component. Final Report of the National Day Care Home Study. Volume 4

Fourth in a series of seven volumes reporting the design, methodology, and findings of the 4-year National Day Care Home Study (NDCHS), this volume presents findings obtained from interviews with parents of children attending family day care. The central aim of the parent component of the NDCHS was to obtain descriptions of parents' needs, preferences, and satisfaction with their family day care arrangements. Chapter I, the introduction, discusses the increasing need for day care provision as more and more mothers of young children enter the labor force, outlines the purpose of the parent component of the NDCHS, and traces the importance of NDCHS findings for day care policy makers. The parent component study design, its research questions, its implementation, and the sample selection process are described in Chapters II and III. The remaining chapters describe data on the characteristics of parents who use family day care (Chapter IV), parental needs and preferences for care (Chapter V), parent expectations and satisfaction with care (Chapter VI), and cost of care (Chapter VII). The final chapter (Chapter VIII) summarizes major findings, describes those characteristics of family day care that are most important to parents, and presents a profile of consumers of family day care. (Author/MP)