Children’s brains form more than 1 million new neural connections every second, and their early experiences shape all aspects of life. Children at risk of developmental delay from low birthweight or disadvantaged family circumstances need access to high-quality child care.
Head Start programs provide such care, but our nationally representative data indicate that the program reaches only about one-third of poor children. Other subsidized options are often limited in quality, especially for families of color.
Social Skills
Several studies indicate that children’s behavior and academic performance improve with better child care. The benefits appear to persist into elementary school, and high-quality child care may also help kids stay on track with their grades in college. Moreover, the benefits of high-quality childcare are more substantial for low-income kids than middle-class families.
In a large longitudinal study of children, researchers found that kids in high-quality child care perform better than those in lower-quality child care, even as they age. This suggests that improving child care quality in the moderate to high range is essential to yield measurable cognitive and academic outcomes gains. However, examining the effect of quality on children at various developmental periods reduces the likelihood that some of these previously observed effects are due to family selection. Nevertheless, significant direct paths from childcare hours to adolescent reports of risk-taking and impulsivity remained even after these covariates were included in the model.
Language Skills
Language skills are essential for children’s learning and social interactions. They involve a child’s understanding of vocabulary, grammar, and the ability to think critically about language.
Children with expressive solid language skills better express their ideas and emotions. They are also more likely to be ready for and succeed in school. They are also more likely to have better reading and writing skills later in life.
Research shows that a child’s language development is influenced by many factors, including their home and family environments and early learning and care experiences. Having high-quality childcare Batavia, OH, can help support a child’s language development.
Caregivers can promote a child’s language development by talking to them often, using rich vocabulary words, and asking questions that require a more in-depth response (such as ‘why’ questions and questions about processes such as tense or verb modalities). They can also use language development tools such as picture books and puppets.
Cognitive Skills
Cognitive skills include divided attention, which allows children to focus on one task and ignore distractions such as a television, and working memory, which is the ability to retain information for use in the future. They also include problem-solving, the ability to look at a problem and find a solution.
The study followed 1,364 children through their preschool years and into early adolescence. Researchers collected detailed information on the types of child care received and the number of hours they spent on each kind of care. They also assessed children’s cognitive and behavioral functioning at various points.
Using structural equation modeling, researchers estimated direct and mediated pathways between childcare experiences and adolescent outcomes at age 15. They also examined whether family covariates or gender moderated these associations. Significant direct paths remained from child care quality to cognitive-academic effects and from child care hours to risk-taking and impulsivity in adolescence.
Self-Esteem
Childcare provides children with a variety of social experiences. They learn to share and take turns, listen to others, and communicate their ideas with one another in a safe, structured environment. These skills can help kids build friendships that can influence their sense of identity and future as adults.
The fact that children spend a significant portion of their early years in child care makes it an essential part of the everyday life experience for most American kids. This is an important reason why it’s so vital that we invest in quality childcare.
Studies that follow young people into adolescence have shown that higher quality child care can lead to better cognitive-academic achievement in elementary school. But the apparent effects of child care fade by the time they are in high school, probably because later life experiences override what happened a decade earlier. However, it is still essential to understand whether the underlying mechanisms remain intact.
