View Research by Author - Ajay Chaudry

Publications

A multiyear qualitative study describes how low-income parents view their supply of child care, how they learn about their options, and barriers to access. Common impediments include nonstandard schedules, inflexible employers, and unreliable transportation. Challenges are even more intense for immigrants, parents lacking English proficiency, and parents of infants and of children with special needs. Head Start can't enroll enough children to meet demand, and though many families qualify for child care assistance, CCDF spending is capped. Enhancing investment in these resources would help low-income working families get the higher quality and more stable care children need.

A multiyear qualitative study finds low-income families seeking dependable child care are hampered by unsteady work, fluctuating wages, and unreliable transportation. Given many low-wage workers' difficulties finding jobs, especially in the Great Recession, parents selected child care arrangements within constraints imposed by employers rather than what they felt optimal for their children's development. Policy changes could bridge the gap between working parents and professional child care centers. For example, increasing public funding for Head Start, Early Head Start, and child care subsidies would encourage child care providers to extend hours, which would better accommodate more families' work schedules.

Growth in the number of children in immigrant families during the 2000s offset the decline in children with native-born parents. Between 2000 and 2009, the minority share of U.S. children under age 18 increased from 38 to 44 percent, driven by growth in the number of Hispanic and non-Hispanic Asian children and a decline in non-Hispanic white children. While the increase in minority children included children with foreign-and native-born parents, children of immigrants accounted for most of the growth. This brief highlights important trends in the changing demographics of the U.S. child population nationally and across states.

The majority (84 percent) of the 17 million children of immigrants in the United States live in the 100 largest metropolitan areas. Children of immigrants drove the growth in the child population under age 18 nationally and in the largest metros: if it was not for them, the child population in the top 100 metros overall and in many metros would have declined in the last decade. Driven by immigration and population momentum, the child minority share across the top 100 metros reached 51 percent in 2009 and many of the largest metros became "majority minority" metros.

The Immigrant Access to Health and Human Services study maps and describes the policy context that can affect immigrant access to health and human services and the well-being of immigrants and their children. This paper summarizes federal provisions and key aspects of state-level variation related to immigrants' eligibility for TANF, SNAP, Medicaid, and CHIP based on a review of literature and the latest information. It provides a building block for the fieldwork and in-depth assessment of the policy context around immigrant access to health and human services.

This research report presents the findings from a qualitative study of the child care choices of low-income working families in two urban communities. Participants included 86 parents with young children, many of whom were immigrants, English language learners, or parents of children with special needs. We discuss the key themes and variations in family experiences, giving particular attention to parental preferences and the factors that influenced their decisions, within the contexts of their employment and the early care and education programs in their communities. We conclude with policy recommendations that can promote parental access to affordable and high quality care.

Growth in immigration flows in the past three decades has almost tripled the size of the foreign-born population in the United States: from 14 million in 1980 to 38 million in 2007. Immigrants are still heavily concentrated in the six traditional immigrant destination states (California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey), but immigrant numbers grew rapidly in many western, midwestern, and southeastern states. Not surprisingly, many metropolitan areas outside the traditional destination states saw high immigration growth. This brief examines immigration and poverty trends between 1980 and 2007 across the 100 metropolitan areas with the largest immigrant populations.

This data brief is the fourth in a series that profiles children of immigrants using up-to-date census data and other sources. The first brief highlighted the fast growth of the immigrant population and important demographic trends. The second described the family circumstances of children of immigrants, and the third highlighted the circumstances of young children age 0 to 8. The current brief focuses on immigrant families' incomes, economic well-being, food insecurity, and use of public benefits.

Children of immigrants have nearly doubled as a share of pre-K to 3rd grade students since 1990. The share of children under age 8 with immigrant parents stood at 24 percent in 2008, up from 13 percent in 1990. Young children of immigrants account for more than 30 percent of children in seven states, with California leading the nation at 50 percent. The majority (93 percent) of children of immigrants are U.S. citizens. This fact sheet also includes state-by-state data on the number of children of immigrants and the number of children whose parents come from more than 130 countries.

Organizations face increasing pressures to improve, and document, their performance. Good performance management systematically identifies desired ends, selects reasonable indicators of progress through means to those ends, and promotes continuous improvement over time. Key preconditions include assessing organizational measurement-readiness and overcoming inertia—and fear—among middle managers and front-line staff. To succeed, performance measurement must be seen as helping people do their jobs better, not creating new chains for yanking. Nurses and their employers have far to go to figure out how best to organize their caregiving and their administrative supports so as to improve quality and safety while constraining costs. Journal of Nursing Regulation 1(2):60 (July 2010); Marr, Bernard. Managing and Delivering Performance. Elsevier Ltd, 2009.

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