1 CHAPTER 3 Child Care Choices and Childhood Obesity

Over the past three decades, the U.S. economy experienced a sharp increase in the labor force participation of women, causing a similar increase in the demand for non-parental child care. Concurrent with these developments has been a dramatic rise in the prevalence of childhood obesity, prompting the question as to what extent the increase in child care utilization is responsible for the growth in obesity. This chapter examines the impact of various child care arrangements on school-age children’s weight outcomes using panel data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K). An advantage of the ECLS-K for our purposes is that it tracks children’s child care arrangements between Kindergarten and the 5th grade. Our fixed effects results suggest that non-parental child care arrangements are not strongly associated with children’s weight outcomes. Our findings are robust to numerous sensitivity and sub-group analyses.