A Mixed Methods Investigation of Maternal Perspectives on Transition Experiences in Early Care and Education

ABSTRACT

Research Findings: Strong relationships among children, families, and early care and education (ECE) providers are key to quality infant–toddler care. These relationships are shaped during the initial transition period to group care. We used a mixed methods approach to (a) assess maternal perspectives on the transition to group care, (b) explore mothers’ perceptions of factors that made for easy or difficult transitions, and (c) examine associations between maternal and child characteristics and the ease of the transition. Through qualitative interviews, mothers identified factors that played a role in their child’s transition, including the child’s age, the ECE provider’s support, and the number of transitions the child experienced. For mothers, an easy transition was characterized by ease of child adjustment to group care, comfort with nonparental care and returning to work, and being able to exercise some control over the transition. Quantitative analyses revealed that an easy child transition was associated with younger child age, low maternal distress reactions to child distress, and low child social fearfulness. Higher maternal depressive symptoms and maternal distress reactions to child distress were associated with mothers having a difficult transition. Practice or Policy: Implications of the findings for ECE provider training and ECE policy development related to transitions are discussed.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the families who participated in this research. We also thank Mallory Mudra, Ashley Holland, Rita Botbol, Jason Burgus, Kate Jeselnick, and Christina Linden for their help with data collection, management, and transcription.

Notes

¹ Please note that the percentages in this section do not sum to 100% and represent only the proportion of mothers in the sample who stated a particular reason.

² All names used in this article are pseudonyms.

³ We thank an anonymous reviewer for calling our attention to this possible explanation. Although we did not ask the mothers about the quality of the child’s experiences with peers in the ECE setting, we did ask about the number of peers in the setting. Thus, we further explored the association between transition and number of peers in the ECE setting for children who entered child care at an older age. We found that older children (based on a median split on age of entry, Mdn = 4.0 months) who experienced a difficult transition (n = 10) had significantly more peers in the child care arrangement than did older children who had an easy transition (n = 22), Ms = 12.4 and 8.3, respectively, t(28) = −2.39, p = .024. Among the younger children (i.e., below the median on age of entry), only two were classified as having a difficult transition, and thus comparisons were not conducted for this group.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by funds from the Family Resiliency Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and from the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture (ILLU-793-362) to the fourth author.