New Day-Care Study Results Underscore Need for Quality

VOLUME 30 , NUMBER 9 October 1999

New day-care study results underscore need for quality

States across the country should bolster child-care quality standards and better enforce existing measures, said a group of researchers from the largest longitudinal study of child-care to date, at APA's 1999 Annual Convention in Boston.

The message was delivered by four members of the Early Child Care Research Network, which is conducting the study funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The network is made up of 26 principal investigators at 10 sites around the country.

Its four representatives, expanding earlier findings regarding the influence of child care on child development to the third year of life, emphasized that it was the quality of child care--as opposed to the amount of time a child spends in care outside the home--that can have a significant influence on child development. But states have highly varied standards for child care and poor enforcement of those standards, said one of the four, Kathleen McCartney, PhD, of the University of New Hampshire. Children in high-quality day-care programs perform better on tests of language and cognitive skills, she said. And the more standards a child-care center met, the better children performed, she added.

As defined by the American Public Health Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, the standards of high quality include:

Child-staff ratios of three to one for children under 25 months, four to one for children 25 to 30 months and seven to one for children 31 to 35 months.

Group sizes of six for children under 25 months, eight for children 25 to 30 months and 14 for children 31 to 35 months.

Child-care providers who have formal, post-high school training in child development, early childhood education or a related field for all child-care workers at all ages.

"Failure to meet these standards," said McCartney, "may undermine child development." She and her colleagues published the findings from this analysis in the American Journal of Public Health (Vol. 89, No. 7, p. 1072 - 1077).

Other analyses of the study data find that low-quality care for all children--regardless of whether they were in child-care centers, or homes or taken care of by family members--is associated with poorer school readiness and poorer performance on tests of expressive and receptive language skills. In contrast, child-care quality was not associated with a child's social behavior.

Admittedly, said Margaret Burchinal, PhD, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the quality of a child's home environment appeared to have an even greater impact on child development than the quality of child care. However, above and beyond the effect of home environment, the association with child-care quality is highly significant.

The researchers added that social policy should not be guided by a single study. Instead, these findings should be combined with findings from other well-controlled studies.

--B. Azar

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