Child care is a fact of life in America today. More than two-thirds of all children under the age of five are cared for on a regular basis by someone other than a parent. These children may attend day-care centers or nursery schools, go to the home of a provider who tends to a number of children, or be cared for by a relative, neighbor, baby-sitter, or nanny.
Since welfare reform in 1996, more mothers have had to find child care asthey begin to enter the workforce and meet the new work requirements and timelimits. From 1997 to 1999, for example, the share of current welfare recipientsworking for pay rose from 22 percent to 32 percent.
Expanded child-care needs in the wake of welfare reform have also led to alarge increase in the day-care money available to states. In fiscal year 1997,$4.2 billion in state and federal funds went toward this purpose, a 35 percentrise from the previous fiscal year.
Both of these factors -- more mothers needing child care and more funds inpublic coffers to pay for it -- have brought renewed attention to the issue ofchild-care quality, especially for low-income children or those in current orformer welfare-dependent households. This attention reflects, in part, a growingrecognition that child-care quality is important both to mothers' employmentand children's development.
Fortunately, research is providing valuable insights into the link betweenchild care and child outcomes. In the last several years, three major reviews ofthe research literature by distinguished bodies of scholars have addressed thistopic. A good example is From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science ofEarly Childhood Development, released by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine in 2000. In the words of the report: "Higher quality care is associated with outcomes that all parents want to see in their children, ranging from cooperation with adults to the ability to initiate and sustain positive exchanges with peers, to early competence in reading and math."
What are the ingredients of high-quality child care? Safe, clean surroundingsand appropriate space and equipment are certainly important, but they aren'tenough. At the heart of high-quality child care is the nature of interactionsbetween children and caregivers. Research shows that children develop best ifrelationships with their caregivers are warm, supportive, responsive, andcognitively stimulating. Stability of care is also important, as it is hard toform sustained relationships if caregivers come and go.
How does child care today measure up? While there are no nationallyrepresentative studies of child-care quality, generalizations can be made basedon multistate research projects that looked at the quality of care. For example,results from a 2000 study by the National Institute of Child Health and HumanDevelopment's Early Child Care Research Network suggest that the quality of 61percent of settings for young children would be rated as either poor (8 percent)or fair (53 percent), with care for infants and toddlers getting the lowestratings. Such findings provide sufficient cause for concern about the level ofcare available in the United States, especially for infants and toddlers.
The situation at the other end of the childhood age span -- teens -- isanother cause for concern. Recent experimental studies of welfare-to-workprograms have found evidence that teens whose mothers participated in theseprograms were more likely to have behavioral and school problems than children of welfare mothers not enrolled. Such findings suggest that care and supervisionare issues for children of all ages.
Overall, the research linking child care and child outcomes bears somecaveats. We don't know at this point if the children who do better inhigh-quality settings are doing so solely because of their child-care experiencesor because of a mix of reasons. When mothers go to work, they bring income intotheir households, they may experience a boost in self-esteem, and they may learnvaluable skills that they transfer to their parenting and household management.Such factors may benefit children even if they are in child-care arrangementsthat are merely adequate. In addition, parents who are more economicallyadvantaged, more educated, and under less stress are more likely to have theresources and energy to search for better-quality care.
The federal government is funding a new wave of experimental studies to sortout how child care affects children's outcomes. Meanwhile, the existing researchclearly suggests that child-care quality matters -- and that making high-quality child care available, accessible, and affordable is a worthy public investment.
Check out the Politics of Family special page, with links, articles and web-exclusive features!