Parents as child care consumers

Abstract

The child care related values and quality assessments of parents as child care consumers were examined. Seven hundred and twenty-seven parents of infants/ toddlers and 2,407 parents of preschoolers responded to questionnaires, providing both importance and quality ratings for aspects of child care. Quality ratings for these same aspects of care were completed by trained data collectors. Parents gave high importance scores for all aspects of care, with higher scores for interactions, health and safety related items than for other aspects of care. Parents gave their children's quality of care significantly higher ratings than did observers. When parents and observers rated the quality of aspects of care that were easy to monitor, differences in parent/observer quality scores were smaller than when they rated aspects that were more difficult to monitor. As parental values increased for an aspect of care, the difference between parent and observer quality scores also increased.