Child Care Quality: Does It Matter and Does It Need to be Improved? (Full Report)

Deborah Lowe Vandell

Educational Sciences
Institute for Research on Poverty
University of WisconsinMadison

Barbara Wolfe¹

Department of Economics
Preventive Medicine
Institute for Research on Poverty
University of WisconsinMadison

Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Washington, D.C.

Child care has become the norm for young children in the United States. In 1995, 59 percent of children who were 5 years or younger were in nonparental care arrangements on a regular basis (Hofferth, Shauman, Henke, and West, 1998). This care typically began at early ages and lasted substantial hours: with 44 percent of infants under the age of 1 year were in nonparental care for an average of 31 hours a week. In the late preschool years, 84 percent of 4- to 5-year-olds were recorded as being in child care for an average of 28 hours per week. The use of nonparental care in the United States is expected to grow even further as welfare reform is fully implemented (Vandell, 1998).

It is within this framework of widespread and early-age use that questions about child care quality have been raised. Among child care researchers, the established view is that child care quality contributes to children’s developmental outcomes, higher quality care being associated with better developmental outcomes and poorer quality care being associated with poorer outcomes for children (Clarke-Stewart and Fein, 1983; Phillips, 1987). This view is reflected in Michael Lamb’s (1998) comprehensive critique of child care research that was published in the Handbook of Child Psychology. Lamb concluded, based on extant research, that:

“Quality day care from infancy clearly has positive effects on children’s intellectual, verbal, and cognitive development, especially when children would otherwise experience impoverished and relatively unstimulating home environments. Care of unknown quality may have deleterious effects.” (p. 104)

A similar conclusion was drawn in a review prepared for the Rockefeller Foundation (Love, Schochet, and Meckstroth, 1996):

“The preponderance of evidence supports the conclusion of a substantial positive relationship between child care quality and child well-being. Evidence for this relationship encompasses multiple dimensions of quality and diverse indicators of children’s well-being.” (p. 3)

This view, however, is not uniformly held. Some researchers and policy makers have begun to question the conventional wisdom regarding child care quality (Besharov, 2000; Blau, 1999c; Scarr, 1998). Sandra Scarr (1998), for example, has concluded that:

“Widely varying qualities of child care have been shown to have only small effects on children’s concurrent development and no demonstrated long term impact, except for disadvantaged children.” (p. 95)

A major goal of the current report is to evaluate the research evidence from which these claims and counterclaims are drawn. We then analyze the argument for public intervention to improve the quality of child care, especially for children from lower income-families.

A careful review of the literature indicates that reviewers often draw on the same research studies, but interpret findings differently. These different interpretations are based, in part, on where the reviewers have “set the bar.” Some researchers place more weight on studies that include observational assessments of child care quality and that measure psychological processes using multiple strategies (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 1994). These same investigators tend to place less emphasis on the necessity of large, nationally representative samples. Although the investigators believe that it is important to assess and control for selection biases, they worry more about overcontrol than undercontrol in their analyses. In contrast, others (see Besharov, 2000; Blau, 1999c, in press) have emphasized the importance of large, nationally representative samples and the need to have sufficient controls in the statistical analyses. These investigators have placed greater credence on information obtained from nationally representative surveys, even if studies lacked observational assessments of child care quality or objective measures of child performance.

An additional factor contributing to different conclusions about child care quality is how heavily reviewers weigh the importance of concurrent vs. long-term findings. As can be seen on Tables 1, 2, and 3, the research literature describing concurrent associations between child care quality and child performance is larger and findings are more consistent than the research literature that tests for longer-term effects. A number of factors may contribute to the more mixed picture for long-term effects, including measurement problems and lack of control for experiences during the intervening period. A better consensus about realistic and reasonable expectations about effect sizes also is needed (McCartney & Rosenthal, in press).

Thus, a variety of factors must be considered if we are to determine whether associations between child care quality and children’s developmental outcomes are large enough for parents, researchers, and policy makers to care about, and whether effects warrant public or private expenditures to improve quality. In an effort to address these broad issues, we pose five specific questions:

1. How is child care quality measured?
2. Does quality of child care have meaningful effects on children’s developmental outcomes?
3. Does child care quality affect maternal employment?
4. What is the quality of care in the United States? And
5. Is there a persuasive economic argument to justify public intervention to improve the quality of child care?