Child Care Services, Socioeconomic Inequalities, and Academic Performance

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To determine if child-care services (CCS) at a population level can reduce social inequalities in academic performance until early adolescence. METHODS:A 12-year population-based prospective cohort study of families with a newborn (n = 1269). Two CCS variables were estimated: "intensity" (low, moderate, and high number of hours) and "center-based CCS type" (early onset, late onset, and never exposed to center-based CCS). RESULTS:Children from low socioeconomic status (SES) families who received high-intensity CCS (any type), compared with those who received low-intensity CCS, had significantly better reading (standardized effect size [ES] = 0.37), writing (ES = 0.37), and mathematics (ES = 0.46) scores. Children from low-SES families who received center-based CCS, compared with those who never attended center care, had significantly better reading (ES early onset = 0.68; ES late onset = 0.37), writing (ES early onset = 0.79), and mathematics (ES early onset = 0.66; ES late onset = 0.39) scores. Furthermore, early participation in center-based CCS eliminated the differences between children of low and adequate SES on all 3 examinations (ES = -0.01, 0.13, and -0.02 for reading, writing, and mathematics, respectively). These results were obtained while controlling for a wide range of child and family variables from birth to school entry. CONCLUSIONS:Child care services (any type) can reduce the social inequalities in academic performance up to early adolescence, while early participation in center-based CCS can eliminate this inequality. CCS use, especially early participation in center-based CCS, should be strongly encouraged for children growing up in a low-SES family. WHAT'S KNOWN ON THIS SUBJECT:Previous studies indicate that higher quality of child-care services have long-lasting cognitive benefits, regardless of SES. However, there is disparity between studies as to whether child-care intensity and type can reduce these social inequalities up to adolescence. WHAT THIS STUDY ADDS:At a population level, child-care services were shown to have either reduced or eliminated the social inequalities in academic achievement up to adolescence after careful control of selection bias and attrition.

Early childhood child care and disruptive behavior problems during adolescence: a 17‐year population‐based propensity score study

“…The amount of time spent in child care per week, measured as the number of hours per week, was modeled using k ‐means for longitudinal data, a nonparametric longitudinal clustering technique (Genolini, Alacoque, Sentenac, & Arnaud, ). The model yielded three trajectories representing the intensity of child‐care use across early childhood (Herba et al., ; Laurin et al., ; Pingault, Côté, Galéra, et al., ; Pingault, Côté, Lacourse, et al., ): high intensity ( n = 751, 36.5%), in which children followed a rapid increase in child‐care use from 5 months to 1½ then remained stable at 30–40 hr per week, low intensity ( n = 699, 34%), in which children had no or minimal child‐care use, and moderate intensity ( n = 607, 29.5%), in which children steadily increased the number of hours they spent in child care, until reaching the same level as that of children in the high intensity child‐care use trajectory (Figure ).…”

“…However, population‐level interventions targeting low socioeconomic status (SES) families are expensive and challenging to implement. Child‐care services, which have become widely used over the past decades (60%–90% in Europe and North America; Petitclerc et al., ), have been promoted as an efficacious way to counteract early exposure to high‐risk home environments (Côté, Borge, Geoffroy, Rutter, & Tremblay, ; Côté et al., ; Herba et al., ; Laurin et al., ).…”

“…However, other studies reported that the effect of child‐care exposure depends on pre‐existing family adversities. Indeed, studies found positive effects of child‐care exposure for children from low SES families (Côté, Doyle, Petitclerc, & Timmins, ; Côté et al., , ; Geoffroy et al., ; Laurin et al., ) and for children of depressed mothers (Herba et al., ), while no effects were found for children without such risk factors. For example, using data from the population‐based Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development (QLSCD), we previously showed that children of mothers with low levels of education exposed to early child care (i.e., starting at 1 year) exhibited substantially lower levels of physical aggression at 5 years of age, while this association was not found for children of mothers with high levels of education (Côté et al., ).…”

Understanding early childhood education and care utilization in Canada: implications for demand and oversight

“…For example, Goelman and Pence (1988) found that licensed HCC providers tend to be of higher quality when compared to unlicensed HCC. Findings from Quebec (Japel et al 2005;Bigras et al 2010) suggest that quality of center-based programs generally exceeds that of HCC (Laurin et al 2015). Finally, quality scores have also been found to be much more variable in both licensed and unlicensed HCC than it is in centers (Goelman and Pence 1988).…”

How toddlers' irritability and fearfulness relate to parenting: A longitudinal study conducted among Quebec families

“…Higher scores on this scale indicate poorer health conditions, at risk of compromising the child's development. This measure of neonatal health risk indicator has also been used in a number of previous studies (Laurin, et al, 2015b;Nikièma, Zunzunegui, Séguin, Gauvin, & Potvin, 2008;Séguin, Xu, Potvin, Zunzunegui, & Frohlich, 2003).…”