Working families must manage the dual demands of child care and employment, but for low-income families, securing affordable, high-quality child care that aligns with parental work schedules, family budgets, and children’s developmental needs can be especially difficult. How do low-income parents in the United States navigate these competing demands? What tradeoffs do they make, and what child care arrangements do they ultimately use? How do public policies shape these choices, and where do they fall short? And how can policy better support families facing these work-care challenges?
During almost three decades at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, Julia Henly, the Samuel Deutsch Professor, has studied the factors shaping how low-income families arrange and pay for child care—and how public policies can better support them. Her child-care research examines how parents make child-care decisions, how child-care subsidies affect families and providers, and how child-care programs are financed. Her employment research focuses on nonstandard and precarious work schedules that can interfere with caregiving, as well as workplace policies that can stabilize employment and give workers greater flexibility to meet their caregiving responsibilities.
As the principal investigator of several research partnerships with state government and community agencies, Henly has studied the primary public child-care assistance program in the United States. Her team’s research has shown how unstable employment and complicated program rules can contribute to families leaving the child-care assistance program prematurely and experiencing disruptions in care. The research has also shown that reducing administrative burden can make it easier for eligible families to maintain child-care assistance: Following a policy reform that reduced how frequently families had to demonstrate their eligibility, the length of time eligible families remained in the child-care assistance program increased significantly.
A fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare and the Society for Social Work and Research, Henly has also been a fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Interdisciplinary Research Leaders program and a distinguished fellow of the William T. Grant Foundation. Her research has been funded by the Administration for Children & Families (US Department of Health and Human Services), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and other foundations.