Quality Matters

A federally funded study finds that obedience and academic problems among children who received low-quality care in their first 4½ years of life persist through their 15th birthdays, suggesting the potential for lifelong difficulties. Teenagers who had received higher-quality child care are less likely to report engaging in problem behaviors such as arguing, being mean to others and getting into fights.

Teens who were in high-quality child care settings as young children scored slightly higher on measures of academic and cognitive achievement and were slightly less likely to report acting-out behaviors than peers who were in lower-quality child care arrangements during their early years, according to the latest analysis of a long-running study funded by the National Institutes of Health. The study results appear in the May/June 2010 issue of the journal Child Development.

Rating child-care quality on a scale of 1 to 4, researchers found that more than 40 percent of the children experienced high-quality or moderately high-quality care. They noted a modest correlation between higher quality care and higher results on cognitive and academic assessments, including reading and math tests. This correlation was similar at age 4½ and age 15. A new finding that emerged at age 15 was that youth who had spent more time in quality child care as young children reported fewer acting-out behavior problems as teenagers.

These findings can be logically extended to confirm AppleTree’s theory of change; that by providing young children with a high-quality focus on the acquisition of cognitive and non-cognitive school readiness skills, we can boost their later academic performance, thereby improving life outcomes.

It is important to note that the positive correlations are strongest to quality care. Quality can be assessed on a host of factors, including caregivers’ warmth, sensitivity, emotional support, and how much cognitive stimulation they provide. These factors are best achieved by skilled professionals who are trained to support the development of young children and who are intentional in their interactions with children.