Ethnic differences in child care selection: The influence of family structure, parental practices, and home language

Recent work reveals sharp disparities in which types of children participat e in centers and preschools. Enrollment rates are especially low for Latino children, relative to Black and Angle preschoolers, a gap that remains aft er taking into account maternal employment and family income. Early attempt s to model parents' likelihood of enrolling their youngster in a center hav e drawn heavily from the household-economics tradition, emphasizing the inf luence of cost and family income. Yet we show that, after controlling for h ousehold-economic factors, the household's social structure and the mother' s language, child-rearing beliefs, and practices further help to predict th e probability of selecting a center-based program. Children are more likely to be enrolled in a center when the mother defines child rearing as an exp licit process that should impart school-related skills-reading to her young ster, frequenting the library, teaching cooperative skills, and speaking En glish. After taking these social factors into account, ethnic differences i n center selection still operate: African American families continue to par ticipate at higher rates for reasons that may not be solely attributable to family-level processes, such as greater access to Head Start centers or st ate preschools. In addition, the lower center selection rate for Latinos ap pears to be lodged primarily in those families which speak Spanish in the h ome, further pointing to how cultural preferences are diverse and interact with the local supply of centers. These findings stem from an analysis of w hether, and at what age, a national sample of 3,624 children first entered a center, using discrete-time survival analysis. We discuss how center sele ction can be seen as one element of a broader parental agenda, linked to pa rents' acculturation to middle-class Anglo commitments and involving the ta sk of getting one's child ready for school.