Child Care

Child Care and Developmental Outcomes 3

Last Updated Nov 18, 2008 01:44 PM

In order to evaluate the magnitude of these findings, the NICHD investigators conducted parallel analyses that tested relations between quality of the home environment during the first 3 years and the child developmental outcomes (using the same covariates), and relations between child care hours during the first 3 years and child developmental outcomes (using the same covariates). Table 6 presents these effect sizes as well. Effects associated with quality of the home environment (the cumulative composite scores created from the Bradley and Caldwell HOME scale and mother-child interaction ratings) were roughly twice the size of the child care quality score. Effects associated with child care hours were substantially smaller than effects associated with child care quality. The NICHD investigators argued that these findings suggest effects of child care quality assessed longitudinally to age 3 years were neither huge nor trivial, but were large enough to be meaningful. It also should be noted that these effect sizes are likely to be a conservative estimate because of the selective participation by higher-quality settings. If the poorest quality child care settings refused to allow observations to be conducted, the range of quality scores would be truncated, resulting in smaller effect sizes.

Longer-term findings obtained from the Otitis Media Study (Burchinal, Roberts, Riggins, Zeisel, Neebe, and Bryant, in press) are consistent with those reported in the NICHD study.

In that study, hierarchical linear models were tested. Observations of classroom quality obtained annually over a 3-year period were used to predict children’s adjustment up to age 3 years. Higher-quality child care over time was associated with better cognitive development, better receptive and expressive language skills, and better functional communication skills over time, controlling for child gender, family poverty status, and home environment quality.