Adolescents Assuming Adult Roles

Résumé du livre

Recent experimental evidence has documented the negative effects of work-promoting welfare policies on adolescents. One potential explanation for these effects is that when parents must work, adolescents may be required to provide child care for younger siblings, occupying time that could be spent on homework or enrichment activities. This research has engendered questions about the extent to which adolescents are used as regular child care providers for their younger siblings. Using a theoretical framework derived from the child care choice literature and data from the child care topical module of the 1996 Survey of Income and Program Participation (fielded in 1999), this paper estimates logistic and OLS regression models to discern the family-level factors associated with the likelihood that a family will use adolescent child care and the amount of time this form of care is used. Models are run for single-parent and two-parent families separately. The findings indicate that among all families at risk of using adolescent care nationally (families with at least one adolescent and at least one child younger than 12), 20 percent regularly use this form of care for an average of 9.9 hours per week. Singleparent and two-parent families are equally likely to use adolescent care, but single-parent families use this form of care for longer amounts of time.