Parental Choice of Self-Care for School-Age Children

Abstract

This paper provides national estimates from the December 1984 Current Population Survey of the number of school-age children who in the past 4 weeks have been in self-care or in the care of a sibling or other person under the age of 14 during non-school hours either before school after school or at night. The paper then a logit model to analyze the choice of self-care for their children by parents who use non-parental care. Preliminary results suggest that self-care is primarily used by married educated mothers for older children when there is only a small gap between the time their children arrive home from school and the mother arrives home or between the time the mother leaves home in the morning and the child leaves for school. (authors)