Quality of child care in the preschool years: A comparison of the influence of home care and day care characteristics on child outcome

Effects of the Type of Childcare on Toddlers’ Motor, Social, Cognitive, and Language Skills

Abstract. This study investigated the relationship between type of childcare and toddlers’ skills in four important developmental domains: motor, cognitive, social, and language. A total of 637 children aged 18 and 24 months were either cared for exclusively at home by their parents or relatives ( home-care group) or attended a daycare center for a minimum of 2 days per week ( center-care group). We tested the children’s skills using standard assessment tools and compared the skills of the two care groups. The results suggest that, for the sample tested, childcare type is not related to toddler’s cognitive, motor, social, and language skills.

Effekte außerfamiliärer Betreuung im Kleinkindalter auf die Bindungssicherheit und die sozial-emotionale Entwicklung

Dieser Artikel gibt eine Übersicht über den aktuellen Forschungsstand zu den Effekten früher außerfamiliärer Betreuung auf die Bindungssicherheit und die sozial-emotionale Entwicklung. Im Mittelpunkt stehen institutionelle Rahmenbedingungen sowie familiäre Einflussfaktoren. In Abhängigkeit vom familiären Hintergrund ergeben sich unterschiedliche Implikationen für die außerfamiliäre Betreuung. Sofern bestimmte Qualitätsstandards und Rahmenbedingungen eingehalten werden, kann frühe außerfamiliäre Betreuung die Kindesentwicklung positiv beeinflussen.

Associations among child care, family, and behavior outcomes in a nation-wide sample of preschool-aged children

Canadian data based on maternal reports for a nationally representative sample of 4,521 4—5-year-olds were used to examine associations among child care, family factors, and behaviors in preschool-aged children. Linear regressions testing for direct and moderated associations indicated that regulated home-based care was associated with less physical aggression and less prosocial behavior while high process quality in home-based care was associated with greater prosocial behavior. Among children in home-based settings, being in at least one additional current child care arrangement was linked with greater physical aggression, and low child care stability was linked to greater hyperactivity-inattention, internalizing behavior, and prosocial behaviors. For family factors, parenting behaviors and maternal depression were associated with greater behavioral problems while low household income was linked with greater hyperactivity-inattention among children in home-based care. There was a significant interaction between process quality and household income for physical aggression and internalizing behavior and between structure quality and parenting consistency for prosocial behavior for children in home-based care. Results suggest that child care matters for preschool behavioral outcomes, even after controlling for socio-demographic factors. High quality care appears particularly important for children in home-based care from low-income families so issues around child care quality and regulation should be considered. Findings also underscore the importance of family factors on young children’s behaviors and show that child care and family influences work together to impact child outcomes.

Gender and Attachment Representations in the Preschool Years

Bowlby proposed that the individual's social experiences, as early as in infancy, contribute to the construction of Internal Working Models (IWMs) of attachment, which will later guide the individual's expectations and behaviors in close relationships all along his or her life. The qualitative, individual characteristics of these models reflect the specificity of the individual's early experiences with attachment figures. The attachment literature globally shows that the qualities of IWMs are neither gender specific nor cultural specific. Procedures to evaluate IWMs in adulthood have been well established, based on narrative accounts of childhood experiences. Narrative procedures at earlier ages (e.g., in the preschool years) have been proposed, such as Bretherton's Attachment Story Completion Task (ASCT), to evaluate attachment representations. More than 500 ASCT narratives of preschoolers, coming from five different countries, have been collected, in the perspective of examining possible interactions between gender and culture regarding attachment representations. A specific Q-Sort coding procedure (CCH) has been used to evaluate several dimensions of the narratives. Girls' narratives appeared as systematically more secure than those of same-age boys, whatever their culture. The magnitude of gender differences, however, varied between countries. Taylor's model of gender-specific responses to stress and Harwood's and Posada's hypothesis on inter-cultural differences regarding caregiving are evoked to understand the differences across gender and countries.

Child outcome measures in the study of child care quality

This article assesses whether there are methodological problems with child outcome measures that may contribute to the small associations between child care quality and child outcomes found in the literature. Outcome measures used in 65 studies of child care quality published between 1979 and December 2005 were examined, taking the previous review by Vandell and Wolfe (2000) as the starting point. Serious methodological problems were not pervasive for child outcome measures. However, methodological concerns were most prevalent among measures of socioemotional development. Furthermore, psychometric information on outcome measures was often missing from published reports, and health outcomes and approaches to learning were infrequently studied. Future research should address alignment issues between aspects of quality and the specific child outcomes chosen for study.

Associations between parental and child attachment representations

In the present article on intergenerational transmission of attachment representations, we use mothers' and fathers' Adult Attachment Interview classifications to predict a 3-year-old's responses to the Attachment Story Completion Task (ASCT). We present a Q-sort coding procedure for the ASCT, which was developed for children as young as three. The Q-sort yields scores on four attachment dimensions (security, deactivation, hyperactivation, and disorganization). One-way ANOVAs revealed significant mother-child associations for each dimension, although results for the hyperactivation and disorganization dimensions were significant only according to contrast tests. Conversely, no father-child association was found, regardless of the dimension considered. Findings are discussed in terms of the respective part played by each parent in their children's emotional development.