Exploring patterns in time children spend in a variety of child care activities: associations with environmental quality, ethnicity, and gender

Abstract

In order to build from previous research examining children’s activities and interaction in child care programs, the current study explored whether children’s experiences in child care programs were associated with individual (ethnicity, gender, age) and classroom (environmental quality) characteristics. Using cluster analysis with a randomly selected sample of the participants (n=1,052), groups were developed to represent differences in how children divided their time among a set of activities and interactions. These initial groupings were then validated using the second half of the sample (n=1,142). The resulting clusters identified six patterns in how children spent their time: creative, language arts, didactic, gross motor, high-level adult involvement, and individualized adult interactions. Multinomial logit analysis indicated that individual (ethnicity, gender) and classroom (environmental quality) characteristics were related to how children spent their time but that patterns of associations among the variables for children aged 10–36 months were different from patterns of associations seen among children 37 months and older. The results suggest that researchers need to further explore the ways that ethnicity and gender shape children’s experiences in child care programs.

Introduction

Child care provides a context where many children can experience daily learning, play, and interactional opportunities that are often assumed to support cognitive and social development. Rubenstein & Howes, 1979, Rubenstein & Howes, 1983 provided early indication that children’s day-to-day experiences can predict positive outcomes. Indeed, at least one study provides evidence that children’s activities and interactions with teachers relate to enhanced cognitive activity in child care classrooms for poor and affluent Euro-American and African-American children (Howes & Smith, 1995). Another study indicates that orientation to adults, peers, both, or neither could be related to indicators of socio-emotional development (Galluzzo, Matheson, Moore, & Howes, 1988). Child care, however, is also a context where aspects of societal organization—like differential status associated with ethnicity or gender—can also shape children’s daily experiences (for a more complete discussion and review, see Howes & James, 2000). The current study builds on previous research by examining whether individual (ethnicity, gender, age) and classroom (environmental quality) characteristics shape the likelihood that children will spend their time in child care in the ways that could enhance their development. In addition to providing further insight into children’s experiences of child care, the results of this analysis are important for helping us understand the ways that ethnicity and gender play out in child care classrooms.

Our exploration of associations among ethnicity, gender, and the ways children apportion their time in child care fits into our larger framework for understanding experiences within the context of practices and larger societal structures (Howes, 1998; Wishard, Shivers, & Howes, 2003). This framework draws from Bronfenbrenner’s theory of human ecology (1979) and from more recent work that interprets the development of all children within a cultural context (Garcia Coll, Crnic, Lamberty, Wasik, & al., 1996). At the center of this framework are children’s experiences in activities, play with peers, and relationships. These experiences are assumed to be imbedded within the social contexts provided in child care which are, in turn, assumed to be imbedded within ethnic and cultural communities (see Fig. 1 in Wishard et al., this issue). This framework was originally formulated as a means of understanding infant/toddler social development in general (Howes, 1998) and then specified toward the purpose of understanding children’s experiences in child care (Wishard et al., 2003).

Little past research has explored whether ethnicity relates to children’s experiences in child care beyond measures of the quality of the child care environment. The current study explored the role of ethnicity for both theoretical and practical reasons. Theoretically, we included ethnicity to explore whether the outermost circles of our model (i.e., practices of the cultural and ethnic communities), as described above, were reflected in the innermost circle (i.e., children’s behavior as observed in child care). Assuming that differences across ethnic and cultural communities would be reflected in the kinds of activities that children experience in child care settings, we set out to explore whether these differences could be seen systematically across large numbers of children in a wide range of child care settings. In other words, these exploratory analyses were meant to allow us to begin to understand whether differences in the outermost context, the ethnic and cultural community, would be represented in how children spent their time, the innermost context. Our approach in this paper includes only a fraction of the model and is meant to provide a foundation for future research that more directly explores the ways in which program and teacher practices reflect differences among ethnic and cultural groups and the ways that program and teacher practices shape children’s experiences.

In addition to these theoretically-driven reasons for exploring ethnic differences in how children spend their time in their child care settings, we also included ethnicity for the practical purpose of exploring the ways that power differences associated with ethnicity in the larger society might relate to observations of children’s behavior. Ethnicity, particularly as indexed by skin color and other aspects of physical appearance, is often an easily distinguishable characteristic that children recognize early in their lives and to which teachers may be responding (Shaffer, 2000, p. 90). Since these child care classrooms take place in a society where ethnicity relates to power may be a marker for differences in others’ responses to children including responses based on stereotypes and/or prejudices.

We examined activity settings as the level of context to be explored here because it represents an intersection between the opportunities provided by the social context of child care—opportunities likely indexed by environmental quality—and the children’s choices of how to spend their time within that context—choices among activities like language arts or gross motor play. The intersection between these two levels of the model have been drawn into the framework presented in Fig. 1. The particular activity settings observed in this study were selected according to our expectations about the kinds of materials commonly available in child care programs and those thought to enhance development.

Much literature suggests that child care programs vary in the degree to which they support development (for a review, see Howes & Hamilton, 1993) and this variation is reflected by a global measure of child care quality like the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale (ECERS; Harms & Clifford, 1980). Previous research indicated that such measures of child care quality influenced children’s activities (Howes & Smith, 1995) and interactions (Howes & Stewart, 1987). Because the opportunities available to a child at the level of the social context vary with the environment, we expected that children in higher quality environments would be more likely to have access to and therefore more likely to be observed in potentially enriching activities and interaction with teachers.

Gender is a common divider in early childhood. Maccoby (1998) analyzed large bodies of evidence and concluded that by age three children separate into gender segregated peer groups. Within these peer groups children develop the social behaviors and interaction styles specific to their gender. Most literature indicates that gender is associated with differences in form (e.g., pretending to get dressed up to go to a ball vs. pretending to prepare to go to battle with the evil wizard) rather than in structure (e.g., coordinating pretend roles and negotiating a shared story line) of play (for a review, see Howes & James, 2000). Because our activity settings were constructed to capture broad classes of activities that would incorporate varying forms of play and activity, we did not have any specific hypotheses regarding gender differences in children’s activity selection.¹ However, findings about gender differences in the activity settings examined can be interpreted based on our expectations about activities that provide more support for cognitive and social development. For example, if children of one gender spend less time in cognitively enriching activities like those involving creativity or manipulatives than children of the other gender, then researchers and teachers may want to consider ways that teachers can more effectively encourage children of that gender to participate in enriching activities.

Kontos and Keyes (1999) explored gender and age as child-level predictors along with activity, social configuration (i.e., people present including whether the teacher or peers were present either as individuals or in groups), and interaction with teachers as contextual predictors. Their results suggested that contextual factors more than gender or age shaped the likelihood that children would engage in stimulating interaction with objects, peers, and teachers during any given 2-second observation interval. In the current study, we assumed that contextual factors would play a key role in shaping children’s behavior at this micro-analytic level.

The current study includes a new analytic approach to understanding children’s activities in a multivariate framework. A great deal of observational data yield highly non-normally distributed data that do not lend themselves well to multivariate analyses. In addition, traditional data analytic techniques for understanding children’s experiences in child care have focused on associations among variables rather than understanding children from a holistic perspective. The current study used a person-level approach to explore whether underlying patterns in how children spent their time could be identified and validated.

We expected that patterns in how children spent their time would reflect similarities in how child care programs were organized as well as children’s individual characteristics. Stated ideals for early childhood curriculum as written by the National Association for the Education for Young Children (Bredekamp & Copple, 1997; July, 1996) and operationalized by indices of environmental quality (e.g., Harms & Clifford, 1980) suggest that early childhood educational and child care programs should have particular materials (e.g., manipulatives, dramatic play materials) organized in ways that allow children to choose among activities (i.e., activity centers). Because of the activity centers organization in many classrooms and similar activities and materials available, patterns of behavior matching these common activity centers seems likely.

In sum, the current study builds from a rich research tradition by examining possible differences in ways children spend the majority of their time based on individual (ethnicity, gender) and classroom (environmental quality) characteristics. The analyses involved several steps. First, we developed clusters that represented patterns of how children spent their time in child care classrooms—a process that allowed for multivariate analyses with the highly non-normal observational data. Second, we examined individual differences in cluster membership. This analytic plan allowed us to address two main research questions: (1) Are children more likely to be observed in enriching activities within high quality child care environments than within low quality child care environments? (2) Do individual characteristics like ethnicity or gender predict a child’s likelihood of being involved in enriching activities?