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IV. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
Finding good-quality child care is a challenge all parents face, but is especially difficult for low-income families. From its very beginning, the national Early Head Start program has taken on the challenge of ensuring that all settings used by Early Head Start families, whether provided directly by the program or not, meet the high quality standards embodied in the Head Start Program Performance Standards. In carrying out the national Early Head Start Research and Evaluation project, we collected extensive data on the child care settings used by Early Head Start and control group families for their children. This policy report has described the patterns of child care used by Early Head Start families, the levels of quality in the centers and family child care homes that Early Head Start families used, and the degree of parents’ satisfaction with the care received. It has also described the impacts of Early Head Start on child care use and quality, based on analyses that take advantage of the randomized design of the national evaluation.
A high proportion of Early Head Start families placed their children in child care during the evaluation period, with higher child care use among those in center-based sites. This was to be expected because center-based programs recruited families who were looking for full-time child care. Compared with families not using child care, those who did were more likely to be single parents, employed, and have more education. How much child care they used (the intensity of child care use) increased somewhat as children got older, going from an average of 29 hours a week in any child care around the time the Early Head Start children were 14 months old to 32 hours when they were 36 months. Nearly two-thirds of 3-year-old Early Head Start children spent at least 30 hours per week in some kind of child care arrangement. Children’s primary child care arrangement was most likely to be a child care center, with 48 percent of children having a center as their primary arrangement at age 3; 35 percent were in less-formal settings, with about one-third of those in nonrelative care, one-third cared for by grandparents, and the other third by other relatives.1
Using standard, objective measures of child care process quality, we found that Early Head Start children attending classrooms in Early Head Start centers consistently experienced good quality care, on average, across the three age points, with only slight variation among centers (between average ratings of 5.0 and 5.2 on the ITERS and ECERS-R). The quality of community centers Early Head Start children attended was somewhat lower, but improved over time, going from a mean of 3.8 on the ITERS at 14 months to 4.9 on the ECERS-R at 36 months. Overall, at age 3, Early Head Start children in center child care, whether operated by Early Head Start programs or not, experienced good quality, averaging 5.0 on the ECERS-R. Child-adult ratios in Early Head Start centers consistently met the stringent requirements of the Head Start Program Performance Standards, but increased from ratios of 2.6 children per adult at 14 months to 3.0 to 1 at 24 months and 4.5 to 1 at 36 months. Furthermore, child-adult ratios in Early Head Start centers were all consistently lower (more favorable) than the ratios children experienced when they were in community centers.
Unfortunately, we cannot characterize the quality of care in informal or family child care as reliably as center care—because we were not as successful in gaining access to less-formal settings, the sample is smaller and subject to potential bias. Nevertheless, the process quality of family child care used by Early Head Start children generally appeared to be lower than the quality in centers Early Head Start children used. As with center care quality, quality in family child care also improved slightly over time, but it but remained substantially lower than center quality in the sample we observed. Average FDCRS ratings increased from 3.4 at 14 months to 3.9 at age 3, still well below what is typically considered good quality care. Child-adult ratios in family child care were good, increased somewhat as children got older (from 3.2 to 1 at 14 months of age to 4.0 to 1 at age 3), but remained within the range of acceptable quality for child-adult ratios.
A unique feature of the Early Head Start child care data were observations of specific interactions of the focus child with his or her caregiver in the child care settings where the global quality ratings were conducted at 2 and 3 years of age. In about half the observation periods coded using the Child-Caregiver Observation System (C-COS), Early Head Start caregivers were observed talking with the focus child, and the frequency of caregiver talk was greater in Early Head Start than in community centers when children were 3 years old (but not when they were 2). Early Head Start caregivers also initiated talk with the child more than caregivers in community centers did, but at age 3 only. Incidents of negative child behavior were very low for all Early Head Start children, and the incidence was not different in Early Head Start and community centers at either age. C-COS data suggested that Early Head Start children in family child care experienced somewhat more caregiver talk than children in center care, in contrast to the global quality differences between the two modes of care.
Although these observational measures of quality are important, the perceptions of the consumers—the Early Head Start parents—are also important. Across all types of providers used, of all the Early Head Start parents with children in child care at 28 months after enrollment, very high percentages reported being satisfied with their recent primary child care arrangement—they liked the arrangement in terms of how much attention the child received, how much he or she was learning, its safety features, and how “good” they thought the provider was with children. Even with high levels of satisfaction, however, 29 percent of parents said they would like to change the arrangement, if cost were not a factor (at 28 months after enrolling in Early Head Start). This finding applies to parents with children in community centers, as well as to those in Early Head Start centers. Over time, the parents across all program approaches who were using child care found their child care arrangements more acceptable (at 7 months after enrollment, 38 percent had said they wanted to change arrangements). The longer families were enrolled in Early Head Start (and the older their children were), the more likely they were to be using a child care arrangement they liked. When parents expressed an interest in changing arrangements, the overwhelming preference was for center care (80 percent of parents at 28 months after enrollment), although small percentages of parents did prefer relative care or other arrangements. When parents wanted to switch to center care, their main reasons were that they wanted their child to learn better and to be with other children. When parents wanted to change to relative care, it was mainly to ensure the child’s safety and for convenience.
In the impact analyses, using all 17 sites in the research sample, we found that at all ages Early Head Start programs significantly increased the percentage of families using any child care, the percentage using center care, and the average hours per week that children were in care. Program participation also led to a smaller percentage of parents with primary care arrangements during nonstandard hours—during both evening and weekend hours. Whether this is helpful to families depends on their work schedules. Most important, however, Early Head Start programs significantly, and dramatically, increased the percentage of children who were in good-quality center care at all ages at the four center-based sites and selected mixed-approach sites. Based on the analysis of ITERS scores, Early Head Start children were three times more likely to be in good-quality center care than were control group children at 14 and 24 months of age (and about one and a half times more likely to be in a good-quality centers at 36 months, according to the ECERS-R scores). These impacts occurred with all our measures of process quality—the global measures of quality (ITERS and ECERS-R), child-adult ratios, and the specific child-caregiver interaction measures.
This paper also has provided evidence of the likelihood that participation in the Early Head Start program is responsible for the program-control differences in quality that we observed at a subset of sites. Children in Early Head Start centers experienced significantly higher quality than did control group children in the same sites—on the ITERS at 14 and 24 months of age and on the ECERS-R at 36 months, on the Arnett scale at all three ages, and on child-adult ratios at all age points. Except for the 36-month age point, where the differences were smaller, though still statistically significant, the program-control differences were substantial. For example, at 14 and 24 months of age, the program group was about one point higher on the ITERS. Program-control differences in child-adult ratios were also dramatic: Early Head Start children experienced center settings in which there was about one fewer child per adult than the control group experienced (for example, 2.8 to 1 versus 3.9 to 1 at 14 months, and 5.6 to 1 versus 6.8 to 1 at 36 months).
Program-control differences were not as large on the child-caregiver interaction measures, although almost all differences favored Early Head Start centers. The significant differences included a higher number of incidents of any caregiver talk in both center-based and mixed-approach sites at 24 months and incidents of caregiver responding in mixed-approach sites when children were 24 months old.
Analyses within the Early Head Start program sample demonstrate that amount and quality of center care are associated with positive developmental outcomes for the children, a finding that is consistent with an extensive child care research literature.
Taken together, the results reported in this policy paper demonstrate the highly important role Early Head Start programs have played in responding to the vision of the Advisory Committee on Services for Families with Infants and Toddlers. Early Head Start families were not only receiving more child care but substantially more good-quality center child care than they would have received without the intervention of the Early Head Start programs. Along critical dimensions, the quality of Early Head Start center child care was higher than the quality control group children experienced, and evidence suggests that this quality is important for enhancing the children’s development.
1 We defined "primary" child care arrangement as the one the child was in for the most hours per week among arrangements that were at least 10 hours per week and that lasted for 2 weeks or more. (back)
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