Edward Zigler Center Child Development & Social Policy / Spring 2013 Lecture Series: "Early Care and Education: Parental Decision-Making in a Patchwork System"

Early care and education services in the U.S. are provided in a diverse “patchwork” of for-profit and nonprofit, regulated and unregulated, and formal and informal settings which parents must navigate as they make complex decisions about work and child care.  How well does the childcare market align with parents’ child care decision-making?  In light of the need to understand persistent disparities in the quality of children’s child care experiences and to inform social policies aimed at supporting parental choice and improving child care, this presentation will focus on research on the mixed-bag of child care services and parents’ decision-making processes.  

Laura Stout Sosinksy, PhD Laura Sosinsky is an Assistant Professor at Fordham University in the Applied Developmental Psychology program in the Department of Psychology.  She earned her PhD in developmental psychology from Yale University, where she remains a faculty affiliate of the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy.  Dr. Sosinsky is a member of the Steering Committee of the University-Based Child and Family Policy Consortium, which is an organization of approximately 35 university-based child and family policy centers, institutes, programs, and departments who represent the social, behavioral, and health sciences, and is a member of the Consortium’s Leadership Workgroup of the Initiative for Evidence-Based Early Childhood Policy and Practice.  She is pursuing a research agenda in the arena of early childhood development in the contexts of parenting and early care and education, with a special focus on parental child care decision-making.  Her scholarly work in these areas has appeared in publications including The Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, Early Education and Development, and The Environment of Human Development, as well as Lloyd and Penn’s new edited volume Childcare markets, local and global: Can they deliver an equitable service? 

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The Edward Zigler Center on Child Development and Social Policy is a platform for speakers from academia, levels of government, community organizations, service agencies, the business world and the media to discuss their work and its policy implications.