Early Child Care: The Known and the Unknown

Abstract

Child care research during the last 20 years has made considerable progress in addressing questions about (a) the effects of child care quality, (b) the effects of amount and timing of early child care, and (c) the effects of different types of care such as centers, child care homes, and relative care. This commentary summarizes the converging research evidence with respect to each of these questions and then outlines some future directions for child care research. The second half of the 20th century witnessed substantial changes in the lives of young children as maternal employment increased and more children participated in nonparental care arrangements. The available evidence indicates that these care arrangements vary widely in quality, amount, and type (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Child Care Research Network [NICHD ECCRN], 1996; 2000a; U.S. Census Bureau, 2003). These variations and the large number of children in care (over 10 million children in the United States in 1999) have raised several questions: (a) Does quality of early child care matter? (b) Does amount and timing of early child care matter? and (c) Does type of early child care matter? Answers to these questions are important for parents and policymakers who are interested in the individual and collective well-being of children. They also are important for developmental theory because of their relevance to fundamental issues in the discipline such as the role