Parents voices: Locating, choosing, and maintaining child care for children with disabilities

The majority of parents in the United States today need reliable non-parental child care. Finding child care is often difficult for families who raise children with disabilities. Difficulties are related to shortages in personnel and rigid policies. Disparate and fragmented childcare services require community-based examinations of childcare options for families of children with disabilities. Such assessments are crucial in light of existing anti-discrimination laws. The Parents Voices research, a grounded theory, was designed to analyze the process by which parents locate, choose, and maintain child care for their children with disabilities. Interviews with eighteen parents (using at least twenty hours of non-parental child care per week for children under six years) and four childcare providers revealed that all parents monitored the quality of care their children received. To locate potential childcare providers, parents relied more on personal referrals regarding the providers' ability to care for children with disabilities than on computer-generated lists supplied by referral agencies. To choose child care, parents made many phone calls to check out logistics such as openings, cost, and enrollment policies. Before and after a child's placement, parents continuously balanced between a provider's resources and the child's special supplemental care needs. Four parents engaged in a detailed, extended interviewing process with childcare providers by which they began to build cooperative partnerships. Cooperative partnership building involved mutually anticipating problems and tackling unanticipated problems surrounding the child's supplemental care needs. The other fourteen parents cycled through multiple placements, negotiating between their own need for care and their child's need for quality supplemental care. These parents experienced discontinuation of care as abrupt breaking points rather than anticipated transitions.