Early Care and Education for Children in Low-Income Families

Gina Adams, Martha Zaslow, Kathryn Tout

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Abstract

Use of early care and education (ECE) is a reality for many families with young children. Research shows the importance of the early years for children’s development, and suggests that high-quality ECE can be particularly important for children from low-income families. In addition, the U.S. invests billions to support ECE. This paper assesses the patterns of ECE utilization by low-income families, the implications for children's development of the extent and quality of ECE participation, the evidence on the quality of ECE that low-income children receive, and the policy context that shapes ECE. It concludes by laying out key policy considerations.

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Executive Summary

Early care and education has become a reality for many young children in America as increasing proportions of families have working parents. At the same time, a growing body of research shows the importance of the early years for children’s future development, with some findings indicating that high-quality early care and education can be particularly important for the development of children in lowincome families. In addition, the United States is investing billions in public funds to support early care and education with a particular emphasis on children in lowincome families.

The convergence of these realities suggests that this is an opportune time to assess what we know about the patterns of usage and the quality of care that children in low-income families receive. This paper focuses on these issues, with the goal of informing the policy discussion about supporting the development of children in low-income families before they enter school.

Key Findings

This paper describes what is known in four key areas—each of which is summarized below.

Early Care and Education Usage Patterns of Children from Low-Income Families

Participation in early care and education settings is common for children from lowincome families. More than half of children younger than 6 in low-income families are regularly in early care and education settings. More than a third of all children in low-income families in this age group are in such settings for more than 15 hours a week. Children in low-income families are found in all types of care, including center-based arrangements, family child care, and care by relatives and nonrelatives in home settings. More than a third are in more than one arrangement regularly.

Patterns of early care and education differ for families with higher and lower incomes. Children younger than 5 in low-income families with employed mothers are slightly less likely to be in early care and education settings overall. They are also less likely to be in center-based care than their higher-income counterparts, and more likely to be in relative care. Child care patterns also differ by age, parental marital and work status, and race or ethnicity.

The use of particular early care and education arrangements reflects access to different arrangements as well as family preferences and constraints. Some factors that play a role in type of care used include the family’s financial situation and access to child care subsidies; the employment status and schedules of parent(s); whether another parent or relative can provide care; the supply, cost, and quality of different care options available in the community or near parents’ employment; access to information about care options; the location of the care and the availability of transportation; parents’ preferences and the care they are comfortable with for the child; and special needs of the child or children.

The Quality of Early Care and Education and Children’s Development

There is consistent evidence of a link between the quality of early care and education and children’s development. This research is based both on findings of an association between quality and child outcomes in the range of market-based early care and education settings available in communities and upon evaluations showing impacts of participation in high quality early care and education programs on child outcomes. For example,

• Research on market-based early care and education settings concludes that measures of quality are consistently linked with children’s observed behavior while in the care setting as well as with concurrent measures of the children’s development.. Linkages, while quite consistent, are clearly smaller than the associations between family factors and children’s development.
• There is also evidence that the quality of early care and education predicts children’s later development, including their early progress in school.
• Some findings indicate that the quality of early care and education may be of greater importance to children at risk for poor developmental outcomes.
• Rigorous evaluations of high-quality early childhood interventions indicate enduring effects on key outcomes, with long-term follow-up studies showing impacts continuing into adolescence and early adulthood. While these studies have generally focused on small, tightly controlled demonstration programs, the evaluation of Head Start, involving a representative sample of programs nationwide, indicates positive (albeit small) program impacts for 3- and 4-yearolds on outcomes in different areas of development. A follow-up study of the Head Start Impact Study is currently examining whether Head Start, too, has longer-term impacts and whether patterns of outcomes vary in light of program quality.

Recent studies find that the type of care and extent of care also are important for children’s development even after controlling for quality. In particular, children who participate in more center-based care in their early years have been found to score higher on measures of language and cognitive development. Children who spend more time in center care are also found to be more engaged socially but to have more conflict with peers. In addition, children with more extensive exposure to child care (i.e., more hours spent in care) over the first years of life have been reported by mothers and teachers to show less positive social behavior.

Recent analyses have examined whether these patterns occur across major demographic subgroups. Findings suggest that the pattern of less positive social behavior for children who participate in more hours of nonparental care (controlling for type of care) does not differ based on family income. That is, more hours in care are associated with less optimal social behavior for both low- and high-income children. In addition, these recent analyses provide indications that while participation in center-based care appears to boost cognitive scores at kindergarten entry for low-income children, it may not influence their academic growth through early elementary school, emphasizing the importance of both early and ongoing family and school experiences.

The Quality of Early Care and Education for Children from Low-Income Families

While we lack nationally representative data on child care quality, large-scale studies in differing geographical regions suggest that overall (setting aside the issue of family income), much of the care in the United States falls below a rating of “good” on widely used observational measures. Further, different studies suggest that about 10 to 20 percent of market-based child care settings have low overall ratings of quality, and may be potentially harmful to children’s development.

We also lack a national picture of the quality of the market-based child care that children from low-income families receive. Some studies, however, raise the possibility of lower quality for segments of this care:

• A substantial proportion of children in low-income families participate in care provided by family, friends, and neighbors in legally unregulated home-based settings. There are important questions about the adequacy of existing observational measures to capture the quality of such settings. For example, existing measures do not capture the tendency of such settings to permit greater continuity between home and child care in language and culture, the forms of support such settings provide to parents beyond the provision of child care, or the continuity of such arrangements and therefore caregiver-child relationships over time. While acknowledging these limitations with measures of quality, it is important to note that several observational studies have found unregulated home-based care of lower quality than regulated home-based settings in which low-income children participate. Studies question specific aspects of quality, such as prolonged exposure to television, missed opportunities for learning, and health and safety issues.
• Research suggests that market-based center-based care is not uniformly of high quality as noted above, and quality in centers may be lower for children from low-income families.
• A growing body of work looking at market-based care serving subsidized children provides mixed results. Some studies indicate that child care settings serving families using subsidies are similar to those in the overall market, and other studies indicate that they are of lower quality on some indicators.

Studies indicate that the quality of program-based early care and education settings such as Head Start and state prekindergarten differs by program type. Program-based early care and education settings such as Head Start and state prekindergarten generally have stronger quality standards as a condition of funding, though studies suggest that the quality of these settings varies. In particular, studies of nationally representative samples of Head Start programs have found that, on average, they are of good quality. However, though state prekindergarten programs are generally strong on such structural characteristics as teacher qualifications and child-teacher ratios, a study of prekindergarten classrooms in multiple states found that their average observed quality scores fell below a rating of “good.” Some research indicates that the overall quality of prekindergarten programs is even lower when classrooms have mostly children from low-income families.

Children from low-income families may be more likely to experience changes in early care and education arrangements. Frequent changes in arrangements or caregivers are assumed to have negative implications for children’s outcomes, as stable and caring relationships with adults are key for healthy child development. A recent review of research suggests that children from low-income families and children in families receiving welfare may be more likely than other children to experience changes in their early care and education arrangements.

The Policy Context that Shapes the Quality of Early Care and Education Settings

Public policies that affect the quality of early care and education tend to focus primarily on one of three goals—supporting parental work, supporting children’s development through access to early care and education programs with specific quality standards, or supporting the quality or supply of market-based settings. While these goals are not mutually exclusive, many federal and state efforts tend to focus more on one than another, with relatively few focusing on multiple goals:

• Help low-income parents work. Policies and programs in this area focus primarily on helping low-income parents work by providing subsidies—usually in the form of vouchers—to defray some or all of the costs of market-based early care and education settings, with less of a focus on affecting the quality of care that is purchased. These are primarily funded through the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF).
• Provide early care and education services to children in low-income families to help prepare them for school. These services are mostly targeted to 4-year-old children, with some going to 3-year-olds and a little funding (through the Early Head Start program) to children age 0–2. Most of these initiatives are targeted to lower-income children. These initiatives include Head Start, Early Head Early Care and Education for Children in Low-Income Families ix Start, and state prekindergarten programs. Generally these programs are not targeted to the children of working parents, and they vary in the extent to which they match with parent work schedules.
• Supporting the quality of market-based early education and care settings through various initiatives and strategies. States use a number of strategies to support the quality of market-based early care and education settings, primarily through a combination of state and federal (largely CCDF) funds. For example, states support training and education for providers, access to health and safety consultation, quality rating systems that give consumers information on the quality of child care settings, activities around infants and toddlers, and Child Care Resource and Referral (CCR&R) services. States are also primarily responsible for state licensing activities, which focus on setting a floor of quality below which programs cannot legally operate. While states have used these funds in ways that research indicates are important to overall quality, the level of funding is relatively small in comparison to the size of the overall market the funds are designed to affect.

The paper concludes by encouraging the consideration of policy approaches that simultaneously support parents’ employment and children’s development; support quality in the range of early care and education settings in which children from low-income families participate; focus on the full period from birth to entry into school; and help address barriers to participation in high-quality early care and education settings for families at greatest risk.

(End of excerpt. The complete report is available in PDF format.)

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