Diversity, child care quality, and developmental outcomes

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2003.09.003Get rights and content

Abstract

It is widely accepted that high quality child care enhances children’s cognitive and social development, but some question whether what constitutes quality care depends on the child’s ethnic and cultural background. To address this question, secondary analysis of data from the two largest studies of child care experiences in the United States, Cost, Quality, and Outcomes Study and the NICHD Study of Early Child Care, tested whether standard measures of child care quality were less reliable or valid for African-American and English-speaking Latino children than for white children. Widely used measures of child care quality showed comparably high levels of reliability and similar levels of validity for white, African-American, and Latino children. Analyses tested whether cognitive and social skills were related to child care quality, the match between child’s and caregiver’s ethnicity, and the match between the mother’s and caregiver’s beliefs about child-rearing. Results indicated children from all three ethnic groups showed higher levels of cognitive and social skills on standardized assessments shown to predict school success when caregivers were sensitive and stimulating. Children’s skills were not consistently related to whether the child’s and caregiver’s ethnicity matched or whether the mother’s and caregiver’s beliefs about child-rearing were similar. These two large studies suggest that children from all three ethnic groups benefit from sensitive and stimulating care on child outcomes related to school success. The results are interpreted as indicating that the global dimension of quality may be reflected in very different types of practices that reflect cultural differences.

Section snippets

Participants

The Cost, Quality and Outcomes Project was designed to examine the relations among child care costs, quality, and longitudinal outcomes for children in full-time care in community child care centers. Included in this paper are child care and child outcomes data collected during the first year of the study in 1993 (see Peisner-Feinberg & Burchinal, 1997 for details). Child care centers were randomly selected from centers providing full-time care for at least 11 months a year in four regions—Los

Participants

Participants were recruited from hospitals located in or near Little Rock, AR; Irvine, CA; Lawrence, KS; Boston, MA; Philadelphia, PA; Pittsburgh, PA; Charlottesville, VA; Morganton, NC; Seattle, WA; and Madison, WI. During selected 24-hour sampling periods in 1991, 8,986 women giving birth were visited in the hospital. Of these, 5,265 met the eligibility criteria for the study and agreed to be contacted after their return home from the hospital. Excluded families included families who did not

Acknowledgements

The work reported herein was supported under the Educational Research and Development Center Program, PR/Award Number R307A60004, as administered by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education. However, the contents do not necessarily represent the positions or policies of the National Institute on Early Childhood Development and Education, the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, or the U.S. Department of Education, and endorsement by the Federal

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