Child care quality and children's cognitive and socio-emotional development: an Australian longitudinal study

Abstract

There is growing evidence that high-quality non-parental child care can contribute to children's learning, development and successful transition to school. Research examining the quality of child care and the effect on children's development is not well documented outside the USA. We used data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children to examine the association between domain-specific aspects of child care quality at ages two to three and children's cognitive (receptive vocabulary, literacy, maths proficiency) and socio-emotional development (internalising, externalising behaviours) at ages four to five and six to seven (n = 772–1136, depending on outcome). After extensive controls for parent, family and child background characteristics, higher quality relationships were associated with higher receptive vocabulary, literacy and maths scores and lower internalising and externalising problem behaviour scores at four to five and these effects although weaker, were still evident at ages six to seven. Activities in child care and provider/programme characteristics of care were not associated with children's developmental outcomes.

Keywords:

• child-care
• early childhood
• socio-emotional skills
• cognitive skills

Acknowledgements

We used data from LSAC, which was conducted in partnership between the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHSCIA), the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The findings reported in this article are those of the authors and should not be attributed to FaHCSIA, the AIFS or the ABS. We thank Dr Lynne Giles for her comments and suggestions to improve the quality of the article.

Funding

A. G. is supported by a Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Adelaide postgraduate award and a Healthy Development Adelaide and Channel 7 Children's Research Foundation scholarship award. J. L. is supported by an Australia Fellowship from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (570120). M. N. M. is supported by funds from the Australia Fellowship awarded to J. L. The researchers are independent of the funding body.

Notes on contributors

Angela Gialamas is a PhD candidate at the School of Population Health at the University of Adelaide.

Murthy N. Mittinty is a senior statistician at the School of Population Health at the University of Adelaide.

Michael G. Sawyer is the leader of the Mental Health Stream at the Children's Research Centre and Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Adelaide. In addition, he is Head of the Research and Evaluation Unit at the Women's and Children's Hospital.

Stephen R. Zubrick is Winthrop Professor at the Centre for Child Health Research at the University of Western Australia and is a Senior Principal Research Fellow at the Telethon Institute.

John Lynch is the Professor of Public Health and the Director of the Data Management and Analysis Centre at the School of Population Health at the University of Adelaide. He is also Visiting Professor of Epidemiology at the School of Social and Community Medicine at the University of Bristol (UK).