| Joanne Roberts
Wellesley College
The influence of early care and education on children's outcomes and family functioning: An ecological model
FINAL REPORT:
Early childhood is a critical time for children to develop the foundations they need for their later years (National Research Council, 2000, 2001). Early childhood development is dependent on maturation and on children's opportunities to interact with supporting and stimulating environments (National Research Council, 2001). In order to fully understand the influence of early childhood experiences, however, children's development must be understood in terms of the influence of family and early care and education, and the relationships among these individual factors.
Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) database, the characteristics of children early care and education experiences at 24-months were described in detail. In addition, the relations between quality of children's ECE experiences and children's outcome were considered as well as the impact that the family environment has on children's early development.
About half of the sample attended some form of non-parental care, with parents most commonly selecting relative care. Ethnicity, urbanicity, poverty status and hours of care all seemed to influence parents' child care choices. Findings suggest that irrespective of quality, child care attendance positively impacted children's development. When quality of care was added to the model, quality had a significant impact on children's outcomes, particularly for children living below the poverty level. Of particular concern for policy is the significant number of children in the study receiving inadequate or minimal quality care. Irrespective of income, only about 15% of programs were rated as providing good quality care as determined by the ITERS and FDCRS. Also of concern, results indicated that approximately 45% of arrangements that children living below the poverty level attended provided inadequate care. Research has suggested that low-income children benefit the most from high quality child care.
Work needs to be done to improve the quality of toddler care for all types of child care arrangements including informal types of child care arrangements. In addition, parents need to be educated on identifying quality arrangements for their children and parents need to be given access to quality programs that meet their care needs, especially low-income families.
Lastly, findings suggest that frequency of parental reading is important to young children's outcomes. In terms of policy, this highlights the importance stressing parental reading to young children and the need to for programs to encourage parents to read with their children at a young age.
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