Children's Social and Cognitive Development and Child-Care Quality: Testing for Differential Associations Related to Poverty, Gender, or Ethnicity

Secondary data analysis of data from 3 large child-care studies was conducted to address questions about whether factors such as poverty, minority ethnic background, gender, or parental authoritarian beliefs moderate the association between child-care quality and child cognitive and social outcomes. Data (N = 1,307) were combined to accrue a sufficient number of children who attended high-quality child-care centers who were from impoverished families or minority ethnic backgrounds to reliably compare their developmental outcomes with those of children in poorer quality care. Children's behavior, language skills, and preacademic skills were analyzed as a function of child-care quality (low-, medium-, and high-quality groups based on the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale total scores), background risk factors, and parental attitudes to test hypotheses about risk and protective factors. Results provide further support for the hypothesis that quality of child care is related to children's development for all children and quite limited support that child-care quality may matter more for children experiencing social risk factors. Language development was the only outcome in which child-care quality interacted with a risk variable, ethnicity, suggesting that quality of care is differentially more important for language development for children of color than for White-non-Hispanic children.