Appraising the Human Developmental Sciences: Essays in Honor of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly

20. Early Child Care: The Known and the Unknown

20 Early Child Care The Known and the Unknown Deborah Lowe Vandell 300 The second half of the 20th century witnessed substantial changes in the lives of young children as maternal employment increased and more children participated in nonparental care arrangements. The available evidence indicates that these care arrangements vary widely in quality, amount, and type (NICHD ECCRN, 1996, 2000a; U.S. Census Bureau, 2003). These variations and the large number of children in care (more than 10 million children in the United States in 1999) have raised several questions: Does quality of early child care matter? Do amount and timing of early child care matter? Does type of early child care matter? Answers to these questions are important for parents and policy makers who are interested in the individual and collective well-being of children. The answers also are important for developmental theory because of their relevance to such fundamental issues in the discipline as the role of early versus later experience and the efficacy of enrichment and intervention efforts. In this chapter I have two goals. The first is to summarize the converging research evidence with respect to the three questions about child care. The evidence from scores of studies represents what we know about the effects of child care on child developmental outcomes. The evidence that I present is not exhaustive but illustrative . My second goal is to consider areas that are unresolved or have not yet been examined. These unknowns, I believe, represent the next steps for child care research. The need for data to address the questions about early child care was one reason that the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) funded the Study of Early Child Care (SECC) (NICHD ECCRN, 2001c). Key elements in the design of the study included a sample sufficiently large (n = 1,364) to detect effects; a diverse sample that included children of color (24%), moth- ers with less than a high school education (11%), and single-parent households (14%); robust longitudinal measures of child care quality , amount, timing, and type (e.g., center, family day care home, nanny); measures of children’s social, cognitive, and language development , obtained during infancy, early childhood, and middle childhood by multiple methods; extensive family measures collected shortly after the child’s birth to use as controls for selection bias; and longitudinal family assessments to evaluate changes in family functioning in response to child care. The NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, the name adopted by the investigators who work collectively on papers from the SECC, has now considered the effects of quality, amount and timing, and types of care in a series of papers that examined children ’s attachment to mother (1997b, 2001b), mother-child interactions (1999a, 2003c), peer interactions (2001a), behavior problems (1998, 2002b, 2003a), social competence (1998, 2002b, 2003c), and cognitive, language, and preacademic performance (2000b, 2002b). Other investigators (Brooks-Gunn, Han, & Waldfogel, 2002; Sagi, Koren-Karie, Gini, Ziv, & Joels, 2002) have used the SECC data set to address related questions. Instructions for obtaining copies of the public use data set are available at http://secc.rti.org/. In addition to the SECC, other large, multisite studies include the Cost, Quality, and Outcomes Study (Peisner-Feinberg et al., 2001), the Family and Relative Care Study (Kontos, Howes, Shinn, & Galinsky, 1995), the National Day Care Study (Ruopp, Travers, Glantz, & Coelen, 1979), and the Child-Care Staffing Study (Howes, Phillips, & Whitebook, 1992). These studies have focused on particular types of care. Challenges and Cautions Before I examine the progress in answering the child care questions, I should note several overarching challenges and accompanying cautions . The first is that most child care research is correlational. As is the case with any correlational evidence, sample selection and omitted variables may explain the results. For example, if educationally minded parents place their children in more cognitively stimulating child care settings, these preexisting family differences may explain an apparent relation between cognitively stimulating child care and children’s academic skills. Or, if parents place children who are challenging or difficult in child care for more hours than less difficult children, this preexisting child difference may explain a relation beEarly Child Care 301 Deborah Lowe Vandell 302 tween child care hours and problem behaviors. The challenge, then, is to reduce the likelihood that these other factors explain child care effects. One way of addressing this problem has been to adopt experimental designs in...