This brief highlights current measures of quality in school-age settings as well as indicators linked to high-quality after-school programs and positive child outcomes.
This brief explores challenges in measuring quality in family, friend, and neighbor child care including: parent choice and definitions of quality; concerns with commonly used quality measures originally designed for other settings; quality measurement advances for family, friend, and neighbor care; and testing measures for cultural appropriateness and competency.
This Review of Research package, which includes a Literature Review, a Research Brief, and a Table of Methods and Findings, synthesizes the current research on family child care providers, parental use of family child care, and quality of this type of care.
This brief highlights current models for supporting and enhancing family, friend, and neighbor care and describes initial efforts to evaluate these initiatives.
School-age children spend time in an array of care arrangements. The most common nonparental after-school arrangements are center- or school-based programs, relative care, and self-care.
This annotated bibliography profiles eight existing large-scale datasets that provide useful information to policymakers, researchers, and others in the field of child care and early education. All are publicly available and have a fairly comprehensive content. Other profiles will be added periodically.
Child care subsidies have the potential to support parents' employment and children's development. This brief, literature review, and table of methods and findings summarize the growing body of research that describes what parent employment outcomes are associated with the use of child care subsidies.
This Review of Research package, which includes a Literature Review, a Research Brief, and a Table of Methods and Findings, synthesizes the research on the family and child care characteristics associated with the use of child care subsidies.
By 9 months of age, approximately half of all infants are in some kind of regular nonparental child care arrangement—26% with relatives, 13% with nonrelatives (either in the child’s or another family’s home), and 9% in centers. To increase the range of care available, policymakers should consider the full spectrum of arrangements, the hours per week children typically spend in each arrangement type, and the factors involved in parents’ choice of care.
With over half the nation’s infants and toddlers in regular, nonparental child care, the scarcity of high-quality infant and toddler care in centers, family child care homes, and with relatives should be a priority concern for policymakers. Across settings, higher quality care has been associated with lower child-adult ratios, smaller group sizes, specialized caregiver training, and general caregiver education.
While research on the effects of education and training on infant and toddler child care quality is still limited, early findings indicate that various approaches—mentoring, noncredit training, for-credit course work—may be effective with different types of providers at different points in their careers. As policymakers await findings from longterm studies now underway, they should build basic evaluations into their training and education initiatives.
A number of strategies can be successful in promoting language and emergent literacy among preschool-age children. But all of these strategies require or are improved by interaction between adult caregivers and children.