Every morning, Kathy Duncan drops off her baby and toddler at day care. Like any parent, she worries.

“At work, I’m surrounded by pictures of my children,” says Duncan, a purchasing officer for the town of Carrboro. “There’s always guilt, and I wish I had more time with them. But I have to put some things in perspective. We’ve even thought about my husband quitting his job and staying home. But we both need the income and personal development that we get from work.”

Day care or preschool is fast becoming a necessity for parents of young children—62 percent of all women with children under age six work at least part time. Studies from Carolina researchers bring mixed news for those parents. One suggests that if child care is high quality, kids won’t suffer. But another shows that high-quality care is hard to find. Not to mention expensive.

The first of these studies may ease some worries. Led by Martha Cox, a senior investigator at Carolina’s Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center (FPG), researchers observed kids at home and in day care from birth to three years. They found that child care is not as closely related to children’s language skills and attachment to their mothers as income, education of parents, and home environment.

Child care did have a small, but consistent, effect. When the care was high quality, children’s language and cognitive skills were slightly higher. The caregivers who had the most positive effect on children’s skills were those who talked to the children, asked them questions, and responded to the children’s vocalizations.

Researchers also observed how child care affected the relationship between mother and child. The child’s attachment to the mother—how much the child used the mother as a source of security—was no weaker for children in child care than for those who stayed at home.

But children who spent more hours in the care of someone other than their mother did have slightly less warm and responsive interactions with their mothers, and these mothers showed slightly less sensitive play with their children. “Even so, these children were just as securely attached to their mothers,” Cox says.

These findings suggest that if parents use high-quality day care, they don’t need to worry about their children. But there is one catch. A study conducted by Ellen Peisner-Feinberg, investigator at FPG, and other Carolina researchers, showed that the average quality of day-care centers was only mediocre. Of 400 centers observed in North Carolina, Connecticut, California, and Colorado, just 14 percent were rated high quality. The rest were mediocre to poor, with 12 percent earning a poor rating.

In centers rated poor, children’s needs for health and safety frequently weren’t met, and often caregivers didn’t encourage learning or show warmth or support. Mediocre classrooms were more likely to meet children’s routine care needs. But they provided only limited opportunities for learning, individual attention, or warm relationships.

“Mediocre just isn’t good enough,” Peisner-Feinberg says. “In those early years, children really are learning and developing, and they’re setting a stage for how they’re going to do in school.”

The results were more disturbing when the quality of care for infants and toddlers was measured separately. For these younger children, 40 percent of the centers gave poor care.

“Babies in poor-quality centers are more vulnerable to illness because basic sanitary conditions are not met for diapering and feeding, and they aren’t likely to have warm relationships with their caregivers. There may be too many children in the classroom for that,” Peisner-Feinberg says.

More poor-quality centers were found in North Carolina than in the other three states. That makes sense, since of the states studied, North Carolina had the least stringent child-care standards and the poorest economic climate. North Carolina allows centers to have one adult supervising as many as 10 two-year-olds, while the National Association for the Education of Young Children recommends one adult for every six two-year-olds.

“I don’t want results like this to scare parents and make them feel that they need to pull their children out of child-care centers. There aren’t a lot of alternatives,” Peisner-Feinberg says. Instead, she’d like the findings to spur policy makers to enact more stringent licensing regulations for day cares and allot more funds to improving care.

The study found that the better day cares had higher staff-to-child ratios, paid teachers higher wages, hired teachers with more training, and had less staff turnover. But all of that takes money. “Where are all these funds going to come from?” Peisner-Feinberg says. “Parents can’t bear the cost of that completely.”

Center-based child care is costly, Peisner-Feinberg says. In the centers studied, even mediocre care cost an average of $95 per week per child. That figure would be much higher if workers were paid competitive wages. On average, child-care workers in the study, who were mostly female, earned about $5,200 less each year than they could in other female-dominated jobs. Making up these discrepancies will take a mix of public and private money, Peisner-Feinberg says.

One such effort to improve child care has been effective, says Donna Bryant, another researcher at FPG. Bryant is leading an evaluation of Smart Start, North Carolina’s effort to ensure that all children start school healthy and ready to learn.

“Smart Start is hard to evaluate because it’s not a program you go enroll in,” Bryant says. “It’s a collaborative process that channels money to counties to use as they see fit.” Counties might use funds for beefing up health-care services, providing day-care subsidies for families, or funding training programs for preschool teachers. For example, one county had not a single practicing pediatrician, so they used part of their money to have one visit each week.

About 40 percent of Smart Start dollars are currently used to improve child care, Bryant says. After visiting more than 360 child-care centers and interviewing families, Bryant’s team found that the money is doing some good. Between 1994 and 1996, child care in the first 12 counties to receive Smart Start money improved significantly. Overall, evaluation scores rose about 7 percent over the two years. The number of centers meeting or exceeding the score of “good” rose from 14 percent to 25 percent.

Bryant believes that the improvements are due to Smart Start because the day cares got better in proportion to the amount of Smart Start money that was spent on child care as opposed to other services. “It looks like this broad-based approach—letting counties decide—is working,” she says.

All North Carolina counties have some Smart Start dollars. Forty-five have funds to actually use for services, while 55 have only planning money, Bryant says. Those counties should get service money soon.

Until such programs improve the quality of care for all families, the best thing parents can do is ask lots of questions and make the most of any chance they have to observe their day-care center. Peisner-Feinberg says, “If you want to get a real sense of what the day looks like for your child, don’t watch how the staff interact with your child, watch how they interact with the other kids.” Staff may act differently when a child’s parent is around.

That’s what Duncan has done. She feels confident about the day care she uses, but it took some legwork to find it. After visiting several other centers, Duncan tried one out for a year, in part because it was convenient to her workplace. But she left it after she saw practices she didn’t like—children weren’t given much structured instruction, staff were sometimes rude to children, things often weren’t clean.

Duncan says, “I wanted a center that was more than just a child warehouse—a place where you drop them off to be put into a big group and watched.”

Article by Angela Spivey.
© Copyright 1998 Endeavors magazine. All rights reserved.
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