Child-care centers are major trip generators for households with pre-school aged children (< 5 years). This paper presents a framework to analyze the factors affecting daily travel choices and challenges of child-care going households. Through rigorous literature review, this study first identifies important variables affecting mode choice, child-care center choice, transit use, and intention to drive. Next, it develops and distributes an online survey questionnaire to the registered child-care centers in Halifax Regional Municipality, Canada, to get data on individual households’ travel choices, challenges, factors affecting those choices, and importance level of those factors, as well as socio-demographic information. The study collects data from over 200 households, which is then analyzed using structural equation modeling to examine the effects of the identified factors such as safety, cost, distance, location, affordability, and convenience on day-to-day child-care trip decisions. The findings suggest that most of the families (73%) rely on private vehicles to make child-care trips as a result of family time, travel freedom, and parking availability. Other variables that motivate them to drive are travel safety, convenience, and opportunity to do trip chaining. Results show that 57% of the households group their child-care trip with a work trip. Distance to nearest bus stop, carrying child belongings, and length of trip to child-care are considered major barriers for transit use. The results of this study are expected to assist policy makers to understand travel patterns and barriers of households with pre-school aged children and help in designing communities to promote sustainable travel behavior.

育儿中心是有学龄前儿童（<5岁）的家庭的主要旅行产生者。本文提出了一个框架，以分析影响日常出行选择的因素以及育儿家庭的挑战。通过严格的文献回顾，本研究首先确定影响模式选择，托儿中心选择，公交使用和驾驶意图的重要变量。接下来，它开发并向位于加拿大哈利法克斯地区注册的托儿所分发在线调查问卷，以获取有关各个家庭的出行选择，挑战，影响这些选择的因素以及这些因素的重要性水平的数据作为社会人口统计信息。该研究收集了200多个家庭的数据，然后使用结构方程模型进行分析，以检查确定的因素（如安全性，成本，距离，位置，负担能力和便利性）对日常托儿旅行决策的影响。研究结果表明，由于家庭时间，出行自由度和可利用的停车位，大多数家庭（73％）依靠私家车进行托儿旅行。促使他们开车的其他变量是旅行的安全性，便利性以及进行旅行连锁的机会。结果显示，有57％的家庭将育儿旅行与工作旅行结合在一起。距离最近的公交车站的距离，携带儿童的物品以及儿童保育的时间长短被认为是过境使用的主要障碍。