This paper estimates the effects of child care proposals for women categoried by economic and demographic characteristics. it presents information about the distribution of child care drop out and special minimum credit years among women by retirement cohort and other demographic characteristics. It estimates the dollar impact of adjustments for caregiving years. With these analyses, we can determine whether subsidizing caregiving years makes sense in terms of adequacy or whether it benefits minorities and persons of lower socioeconomic status. one's judgement of the proposals should depend in part upon who benefits from them. Some of the public discussion implies that lower income women would benefit the most from excluding caregiving periods from the social security benefit computation (AARP 1991).