U.S. General Services Administration

The need for child care is a work-life issue that affects families across all income levels. These issues are particularly challenging in rural areas, where nontradi-tional child care services may be more limited. Using data from a rural county in Virginia, this article examines income level differences in parents ’ reported child care needs. We compare income groups along six variables. Our results suggest that lower income households have significantly more child care needs thanmod-erate or upper income households along three of the variables: need for different hours, need for child care closer to home, and need for special-needs child care. These findings have implications for human resource managers as they consider work-life policies in their organization. Locating quality, affordable child care is an issue for many households, asfamilies ’ dependency on child care has steadily increased over the past 30 years. In a recent study, child care was identified as the most pressing need of families with children (Meyers & Kyle, 1996). Child care issues affect employees who are parents. Researchers compared differences between employed parents and nonparents and found that parents were much more willing thannonparents to trade off salary or other benefits for child care assis-tance. Among employed parents, “fathers were just as likely as mothers to b