E C O N O M I C R E P O R T O F T H E P R E S I D E N T

would allow all workers who get time-and-a-half pay for working overtime tobe compensated in the form of time off for family and medical leave purposesor vacation instead of in cash.Another approach to allowing greater flexibility on the job is working athome for pay. This arrangement is used by a small but growing share ofworkers. In 1997, for example, 3.3 percent of all wage and salary workerswere working at home for pay, up from 1.9 percent in 1991. Another wayparents share child care is by working different shifts. In order for shift workto make it easier to combine paid work and child care, however, the choice ofshifts must be the worker’s. In 1997, 83 percent of full-time wage and salaryworkers were on regular daytime schedules, 4.6 percent were on eveningshifts, 3.9 percent were on employer-arranged irregular schedules, 3.5percent were on night shifts, and 2.9 percent were on rotating shifts.Improving Access to High-Quality, Affordable Child CareMany parents are likely to adjust to an increase in their paid work time byincreasing their use of nonparental child care providers. The availability, cost,and quality of child care are crucial to the well-being of children and to theability of parents to balance the needs of work and family. Primary child carearrangements for preschool-age children of employed mothers in the fall of1994 were divided roughly equally among care in the child’s home (by a relativeor nonrelative), care in another home (by a relative or nonrelative), andcare in an organized child care facility. Since 1985 the trends have beentoward a slight increase in the proportion of children receiving care in theirown homes, relatively fewer children receiving care in another home, andrelatively more children receiving care in an organized facility.The Administration has consistently emphasized the importance of childcare availability, affordability, and quality. Since 1993, child care funding forlow-income families has more than doubled. The budget for fiscal 2001supports a $3.3 billion increase in resources for child care, including morefunding for programs benefiting poor and near-poor children and anexpansion of the child and dependent care tax credit. The proposal wouldgradually make the credit refundable, so that it would be available to lowincomeworking families for the first time. And it would increase the amountof the credit for middle-income families struggling to afford child care. Asdiscussed in Chapter 4, funding for Head Start has likewise increased substantiallyduring this Administration, and progress continues to be madetoward the President’s goal of enrolling 1 million children by 2002.After-school care for children is another concern of working parents. In1998, 68 percent of married couples with children were ones in which bothparents were in the labor force, compared with 28 percent in 1970. Today, 28million school-age children are in either married-couple families where both196 | Economic Report of the President