High-quality care helps children academically
Source: Agencies |
May 15, 2010, Saturday
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Print Edition
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PARENTS worried about putting very young children into daycare got some reassuring answers yesterday - children who have high-quality care see academic benefits lasting into high school.
The latest results from the long-running US National Institutes of Health study show children in high-quality child care scored slightly higher on measures of academic and cognitive achievement years later as teenagers.
They were also slightly less likely to act out than peers who were in lower-quality child care, the researchers reported.
But children who spent the most hours in child care had a slightly greater tendency toward impulsiveness and risk-taking at age 15 than teens who had spent less time in child care, the researchers wrote in the journal Child Development.
Quality for child care is usually measured by how much time the provider spends interacting with the children, as well as warmth, support and cognitive stimulation.
The ongoing study is meant to inform the policy debate on whether both parents should work when children are young and whether providing child care is good for the children, their parents and society as a whole.
"High quality child care appears to provide a small boost to academic performance, perhaps by fostering the early acquisition of school readiness skills," said James Griffin of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the NIH institute that paid for the study.
"The current findings reveal that the modest association between early child care and subsequent academic achievement and behavior seen in earlier study findings persists through childhood and into the teen years."
Deborah Lowe Vandell of the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues tracked 1,364 children who have been studied since they were one month old starting in 1991.
They measured the quality, hours and type of day care, collected results of standardized tests and interviewed the teens, their families and their schools. The children were from diverse backgrounds.
Vandell's team found over 40 percent of the children were given high-quality care and 90 percent spent at least some time in the care of someone other than a parent before age four.
The latest results from the long-running US National Institutes of Health study show children in high-quality child care scored slightly higher on measures of academic and cognitive achievement years later as teenagers.
They were also slightly less likely to act out than peers who were in lower-quality child care, the researchers reported.
But children who spent the most hours in child care had a slightly greater tendency toward impulsiveness and risk-taking at age 15 than teens who had spent less time in child care, the researchers wrote in the journal Child Development.
Quality for child care is usually measured by how much time the provider spends interacting with the children, as well as warmth, support and cognitive stimulation.
The ongoing study is meant to inform the policy debate on whether both parents should work when children are young and whether providing child care is good for the children, their parents and society as a whole.
"High quality child care appears to provide a small boost to academic performance, perhaps by fostering the early acquisition of school readiness skills," said James Griffin of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the NIH institute that paid for the study.
"The current findings reveal that the modest association between early child care and subsequent academic achievement and behavior seen in earlier study findings persists through childhood and into the teen years."
Deborah Lowe Vandell of the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues tracked 1,364 children who have been studied since they were one month old starting in 1991.
They measured the quality, hours and type of day care, collected results of standardized tests and interviewed the teens, their families and their schools. The children were from diverse backgrounds.
Vandell's team found over 40 percent of the children were given high-quality care and 90 percent spent at least some time in the care of someone other than a parent before age four.
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