Talking Points

Child care receives this special focus because even before Early Head Start began, the Advisory Committee on Services for Families with Infants and Toddlers knew that many Early Head Start children would require child care.

The Committee thought this would be true whether the program offered center-based, home-based, or a combination of services.

The Committee went further to recommend that the program be responsible for the quality of care that all children were receiving.

If care was not provided on site, the Committee directed programs to help families find quality care. This would be challenging because the supply of quality care for infants and toddlers in communities was known to be low. Thus, many programs would need to form partnerships with child care providers in their communities to ensure the care that families chose became good quality.

This goal was supported by the Head Start Program Performance Standards that provide direct guidance for quality in child care settings.

The findings reported here are drawn from a longer report, The Role of Early Head Start in Addressing the Child Care Needs of Low-Income Families with Infants and Toddlers: Influences of Child Care Use and Quality (ACF, 2002c).

Additional Information:.

The provision that services for families with infants and toddlers would receive a specified portion of the Head Start budget began with the Head Start Reauthorization of 1994. This law also mandated a committee of experts to establish the framework for the new program.

The Advisory Committee on Services for Families with Infants and Toddlers was appointed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services in 1994. It included child development, program, and research experts from across the U.S. The Advisory Committee made many recommendations to ensure that Early Head Start children receive quality child care.

The Head Start Program Performance Standards were revised and became official in 1998.

A number of studies have documented a shortage of good quality infant-toddler center-based care in the U.S. The four-state Cost, Quality and Child Outcomes in Child Care Centers Study (Cost and Quality Study Team, 1995) reported that fewer than 10% of infant center-based settings were of good quality. Lower quality child care has been found to relate to lower levels of child functioning (Burchinal, Roberts, Nabors and Bryant, 1996) and this has been especially true for low-income children.

Discussion Questions:

• What do the Performance Standards say about child care quality?
• How adequate is the supply of good quality care for infants and toddlers in your community/state/region? What are the strengths in infant-toddler care in your community/state/region?
• Do Early Head Start programs in your area provide on-site child care or partner with community child care providers? What are the pros and cons of these two approaches?