Day Care Quality May Predict
Later Academic Skill
Excerpt By Charnicia E. Huggins, Reuters Health

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - If paying a few extra dollars will ensure that your child is enrolled in a high-quality day care center, new study findings suggest that it is worth the extra money. The quality of a child's day care may determine his or her social and academic skills through the second grade, researchers report.

``Investing in better quality child care for children in the preschool years enables them to be better prepared for school and to do better once they get there,'' lead study author Dr. Ellen Peisner-Feinberg of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill told Reuters Health.

``These findings provide support for redesigning child care policies to help improve the quality of child care in the United States,'' she added.

Peisner-Feinberg and colleagues studied more than 700 children in their next-to-last year of preschool at 176 different child care centers in California, Colorado, Connecticut and North Carolina. Nearly half were followed through second grade.

The investigators found that children who were enrolled in higher quality day care centers, as determined by an assessment of the center's classroom practices--including activities, materials and supervision--had better language, math and attention skills, as well as better cognitive skills, through the second grade. Cognitive skills include verbal intelligence and creativity.

These children also exhibited less problem behavior and were more sociable than their peers, Peisner-Feinberg and her team report in the September/October issue of the journal Child Development.

Teacher-child closeness also had an effect on children's social and cognitive skills, the report indicates.

For example, children whose preschool teachers reported that they ``shared a warm, affectionate relationship with (them),'' tended to have higher scores in language, math and cognitive and attention skills, and this remained significant through second grade.

Further, when the investigators took the educational level of the mother into consideration, they found that children with less highly educated mothers seemed to be more positively affected by their day care experience than their peers.

``These findings suggest that providing high-quality child care is important for all children, and especially for children at greater risk (of having difficulty in school),'' Peisner-Feinberg said.

SOURCE: Child Development 2001.

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