The financing of child care: current and emerging trends.

Early care and education services in the United States are financed by a complex mix of public and private funds totaling about $40 billion annually. In this article, the authors describe the principal sources of funding for child care and conclude that parents pay the primary share, followed by funds from the federal government and those state expenditures that are required to match federal funding. The authors detail a fragmented and underfunded system of finance that is the product of unresolved conflicts between child care policy and early education policy, and between tax policy and expenditure policy. The policy conflicts and insufficient resources create fragmentation in service delivery and inequities in allocation of subsidies.