Child Care

Child Care and Developmental Outcomes 5

Last Updated Nov 18, 2008 08:12 PM

Simple correlations revealed statistically significant, but small, associations between mothers’ reports of caregiver training when the children were in infant/toddler care and the children’s later performance. Children whose mothers reported that their caregivers had more specialized training obtained higher math and receptive language scores. When type of care was controlled, these associations continued to be significant. Blau then asked if these structural and caregiver factors uniquely predicted child performance in a regression model that included 64 additional child care and family variables. These controls included number of arrangements that were used, hours per week in care, months per year in care, paid cash for care, cost of care, center care, family day care home, relative care, child gender, cognitive stimulation, emotional support, Hispanic ethnicity, black ethnicity, grandmother worked when mother was 14, mother’s education, grandmother’s education, fraction of mother’s preschool years her mother was present, fraction of mother’s high school years her father was present, month of pregnancy in which mother first received prenatal care, child’s birth order, Catholic, child received well-care visit in first quarter, mother’s age, mother’s age at birth of child, siblings in various age groups, and fraction of pregnancy during which mother worked. In ordinary least squares regression analyses, relations between maternal reports of caregiver training and children’s math and receptive language scores were no longer evident when these other variables were controlled. From these analyses, Blau concluded:

“There seems to be little association on average between child care inputs experienced during the first three years of life and subsequent child development, controlling for family background and the home environment.” (p. 20)
Blau’s conclusion does not appear warranted, for several reasons. First, his analyses relied on maternal reports of structural and caregiver characteristics. Questions can be raised about whether mothers can provide this information accurately, especially retrospectively. Unfortunately, Blau provides no evidence regarding the accuracy of these reports. In order to estimate the accuracy of mothers’ concurrent reports of structural and caregiver characteristics, we turned to the NICHD Study of Early Child Care data set, which included both mothers’ and caregivers’ reports of group size and child-adult ratio. These reports were compared to observers’ independent counts of ratio and group size during 2-day visits. The mean correlation between mothers’ and caregivers’ reports of group size for children in centers was .55 (range = .51 to .63). The mean correlation between maternal reports of child:adult ratio and observed ratios was .33 (range = .27 to .42). These figures suggest that mother concurrent reports can be viewed as moderately reliable. Maternal retrospective reports of group size and ratio appear to be considerably less reliable. In other studies, near-zero correlations were obtained between observational assessments of group size and child-adult ratio when children were age 4 years (Vandell and Powers, 1983) and maternal retrospective reports of these same structural variables 4 years later (Vandell, Henderson, and Wilson, 1988).

To our knowledge, there are no data available from which the accuracy of maternal reports of caregiver training can be evaluated. We suspect, based on our own personal experiences, that mothers are less likely to know about caregiver training than about group size and ratio, which they can observe. Taken together, we believe that the lack of precision in the mothers’ reports in the NLSY result in an underestimation of effects associated with structural and caregiver characteristics.

Blau also adopted a stringent, perhaps unrealistic, test for long-term effects. Child outcomes were assessed a minimum of 2 years after mothers reported structural and caregiver characteristics, and the lag appears to have averaged 5 years or more because children were reported to be, on average, 8 years of age when outcomes were assessed. Interestingly, there was some evidence of longitudinal associations when shorter time lags were considered (even though mothers’ reports were used). For example, significant relations were found between maternal reports of child:adult ratios and caregiver training during the first 3 years and behavioral adjustment and math scores for children who were less than 9 years of age. Relations were not evident for very long time period, i.e., children who were older than 9 years. Smaller group sizes during the preschool period (3–5 years) were associated with higher scores on math, reading, and language performance. Lower child:staff ratios were associated with fewer behavior problems. The long lag between the infant quality reports and the child outcome assessments is further complicated by the omission of quality reports during the older preschool years, resulting in an underestimation of effects associated with child care quality.