Who Cares for America's Children? (1990) / Chapter Skim
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II CHILD CARE AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT3 The Effects of Child Care
II CHILD CARE AND CHILD DEVELOPMENT3 The Effects of Child Care
Pages 43-83
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II CHld Carc and Chad Dcvelopmcnt
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And in Chapter 5 we review what is known about how child care can support children's physical health and psychological development. PROCESSES OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT Before turning to these issues of child care and children's development, however, it is useful to outline briefly several basic principles about development that underlie the ensuing discussion.
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In short, the relationship between child care and child development is complex. In light of this complexity, it is not surprising that there are no perfect studies and few that are conclusive about the relationship between child care and child development.
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The research on child care is following a similar pattern of evolution (Belsky, 1984; Phillips, 1988~. A first wave of studies asked whether the increasing rates of participation of young children in family day care and center care was cause for alarm.
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It is important to continue to ask how the development of children reared at home and in child care settings differs (the question focal to the first wave of research) , even as questions are asked about the implications of poor-quality care in comparison to care that is adequate or of high quality (second wave)
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reassessments of the theory and research into maternal deprivation are extremely helpful in extracting those elements of early views of maternal deprivation (particularly those of Bowlby) that the research evidence has sustained and those elements that have required revision.
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. Of particular importance in the present context, Rutter's reassessment of the maternal deprivation research concludes that child care does not fall on a continuum with institutionalization (Rutter, 1981a:154~: [where is a world of difference between institutional care without any parental involvement and day care in which the mother remains a key figure who continues to actively participate in looking after the child.
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A further limitation in this wave of child care research in the United States that is important to note is its very heavy reliance on studies of center care, rather than the demographically more prevalent family day care. In this respect much can be learned from the European research, which has more consistently encompassed family day care as well as center care in its attempts to examine the impact of child care experience versus parental care (e.g., Cochran, 1977; Lamb, Hwang, Bookstein, et al., 1988; Lamb, Hwang, Broberg, and Bookstein, 1988~.
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Studies of economically disadvantaged children in high-quality child care intervention programs, however, consistently find more advanced cognitive development in day care children than in homereared children. These children do not show the declines found for their home-reared counterparts from disadvantaged families on tests of intellectual development.
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He suggests several possible explanations for this difference in the findings for model early intervention programs and Head Start. Since data collection has been far more extensive and systematic for the model programs, the long-term effects of Head Start may be undetected by the fewer and less rigorous Head Start outcome studies.
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We concur that Head Start, a federally supported, comprehensive early child development intervention, with strong evidence of short-term benefits in the intellectual domain, should be the focus of carefully planned longitudinal studies that track a broader array of social, emotional, and cognitive outcomes. Social Development Attachment In studying the socioemotional development of children in child care, researchers have been concerned about the nature of mother-child relations.
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Approximately two-thirds of middle-class American infants observed in the strange situation (Campos et al., 1983) are categorized as securely attached; while one-third are rated insecurely attached in one of two ways.
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(1978) for classifying individual differences in the Strange Situation that few have stopped to ask whether [its]
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Security of Attachment and Participaiion in Day Care The findings on security of attachment and child care participation are best summarized separately for children who begin child care in the first year of life or later. For the somewhat older children, attendance in a child care program does not appear to alter the hierarchy of attachments (Rutter, 1981a,b)
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Perhaps most important, studies to date have not yet followed day care children showing anxious-avoidant
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v_r~ Observations of parent-infant interaction in the first year of life suggest that infants in middle-class families in which the mother is employed are engaged in somewhat less playful interaction with their parents than infants with homemaker mothers (Zaslow et al., 1989~. Further research suggests that secure attachment may not be used in the same way by infants in families with employed mothers as it is in families with homemaker mothers.
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Furthermore, we know that factors reflecting psychological distress among employed mothers are related to the emergence of insecure attachment in their infants. Researchers agree that infants of mothers who resume full-time employment in the first year of their infants' lives show higher rates of anxious-avoidant attachment to their mothers.
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Relationships With Peers and Adults Child care researchers have observed and documented the social relations of children in child care (as opposed to home-reared children) in two areas other than the mother-child relationship: relations with peers and with other adults.
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Therefore, it is difficult to say whether differences observed between the social behaviors and attributes of children in child care and home-reared children resect variations within the normal range or whether from a clinical perspective child care children show indications of more or less adequate overall adjustment. Similarly, research to date
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Researchers using the two-group approach have called for increased use of random assignment to care settings and the use of home-reared control groups drawn from child care waiting lists, in order to control for possible preexisting tendencies (Cochran, 1977; Lamb, Hwang, Bookstein et al., 1988) , and for examination of behavior in child care children and their families prior to entry into child care (Lamb, Hwang, Bookstein et al., 1988; Roopnarine and Lamb, 1978~.
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Beyond this broad statement, more detailed conclusions from the first wave of child care research need further scrutiny as methodological refinements become more widespread among studies using the group comparison strategy, notably as studies use sample selection or assignment procedures to control for self-selection and as a wider range of community-based child care settings, including family day care settings, is included in research. At present, however, some conclusions about development among child care participants are possible.
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THE SECOND WAVE OF CHILD CARE RESEARCH: VARIATION IN CHILD CARE QUALITY AND CHILDREN'S DEVELOPMENT As child care research moved beyond model programs to include community-based family day care and center care, it became increasingly clear that child care programs and arrangements are extremely heterogeneous. They vary from minimally structured and custodial environments to highly structured and enriched environments.
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, an understanding of quality would be strengthened if the naturalistic approaches to quality were more often complemented with studies involving random assignment and manipulation of quality variables. Although most studies do control for key family background variables, the possibility remains that ongoing characteristics of the families or children themselves may affect both their placement in care of varying quality and child outcomes.
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Studying care quality in Victoria, Canada, they found quality of care to be much more variable in family day care than in center care, and a `'much more potent predictor of children's language development than quality in centers" (Goelman and Pence, 1987a:9!
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For example, children who were observed to be more sociable both with peers and unfamiliar adults were in out-of-home child care (both center and family day care) that was rated lower in both positive and negative events occurring in child care as observed using the Belsky and Walker checklist.
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population. The children had attended 81 different center care and family day care settings.
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Nevertheless, it is consistent in finding that the quality of center and family day care that children experience in the preschool years is associated with measures of later development. Methodological Issues An important strength of the research on child care quality is its ability to go beyond the model day care programs and more closely describe child care as it actually is experienced by the majority of U.S.
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The strength of the second-wave research to date is that it is very broadly based. The linkage between child care quality and children's development has been documented using a variety of approaches to define quality; samples of varying socioeconomic status; both family day care and center day care settings; and cognitive as well as socioemotional measures of children's development.
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Yet, in the National Day Care Study (Ruopp et al., 1979) , in centers receiving some federal funds, children in classes with better staff/child ratios tended to be from poorer neighborhoods, to have less-educated mothers, and to come from single-parent families.
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Evidence that family variables and the quality of care, separately, contribute to development is of two kinds: correlational studies in which care quality continues to predict child development with family variables controlled, and research designs involving random assignment to different child care situations. Studies using correlational designs have consistently concluded that family and quality of care variables are important contributors.
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goes beyond a correlational design to ask what happens to children of lower socioeconomic status, compared with more advantaged children, when they are in center care of higher overall quality. In this study, the social and cognitive development of children attending a government-run center for low-income children in Bermuda was compared with the development of children attending eight private child care centers on the island.
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A notable exception illustrates the feasibility and usefulness of such a strategy in studying quality. One substudy within the National Day Care Study (NDCS)
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Increasingly thorough and rigorous research on the joint contributions of home and child care factors to children's development can be expected. For example, a few studies now identify and control for a wide range of family factors in considering the impact of care quality, but future work on this issue will have to incorporate views of the family-day care linkage that go well beyond the finding that family factors influence choice of care quality.
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Indeed, the evidence points to aspects of development for which child care is beneficial. The quality of child care in either family day care or center careis important to children's development, whatever their socioeconomic levels and whether one looks at cognitive or socioemotional development.
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1980 Experience and the development of intelligence in young children at home and in day care. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 45~6-73:Serial No.
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Pence 1987a Effects of child care, family, and individual characteristics on children's language development: The Victoria Day Care Research Project.
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Developmental Psychology. in press, b Current research in early day care: A review.
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1984 Effect of quality of day care environment on children's language development. Developmental Psychology 20:244-260.
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Zahn-Waxler 1988 The infant day care controversy: Current status and future directions. Early Childhood Research Quarterly 3:319-336.
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Powers 1983 Day care quality and children's free play activities. American Joumal of Orthopsychiatry 53:493-500.
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