Parental Employment, Child Care, and Child Outcomes in Immigrant Families

Wen-Jui Han, Columbia University
RaeHyuck Lee, Columbia University

A large literature has examined the effects of parental employment and child care arrangements on child outcomes, but rarely with an explicit focus on children of immigrants. This is an important omission, because immigrant families have quite different work and child care arrangements than their native born peers. Our paper uses data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B), a large nationally representative birth cohort study that collects extremely rich data on children and families at 9 months, 2 years, 4 years, and 5 years post-birth. We document patterns of parental employment and child care arrangements for children of immigrants in comparison to children of native-born parents and estimate the effect of those parental employment and child care arrangements on child outcomes for both groups.