Child care subsidies offer working poor parents a crucial boost up the economic ladder, helping them keep jobs and move on to better paying work. But, the number of families using these subsidies actually dropped in recent years.

This week, the General Accountability Office reports the number of children served under the Child Care and Development Fund fell ten percent between 2006 and 2008. While the exact reasons the number of kids helped are not crystal clear, the GAO suggested a few possibilities:  changing state-level requirements; shifting economic needs during the recession and state decisions on allocating resources.

The other important news in this report is how few eligible families use these subsidies. Roughly a third of eligible children received subsidies from 2004 to 2007, the GAO found.

Over at CLASP, there is a great analysis of the report, including the observation that numbers dropped while the poverty rate rose.

“In other words, the number of children receiving help has fallen while the number of children living in low-income families potentially eligible for assistance has grown. The result may be a larger share of unserved children today, as compared to 2000.” – GAO Releases New Report on Child Care Assistance, CLASP, 5/6/10.

I have covered child care subsidies for awhile and this report offered one of the clearest, if somewhat dry, explanations of how these subsidies work.

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