Does Out-of-home Care Affect Compliance in Preschoolers?

When they averaged 28 and 40 months of age, 140 Swedish children were observed with their mothers in two situations (a problem-solving task and a clean-up session) designed to allow the assessment of their compliance with maternal demands. Individual differences in their behaviour were then related to measures of the quality of care received by them both at home and in alternative care settings when they averaged 16, 28, and 40 months of age, the amount of social support reportedly received by the mothers, the children's ages, and the amount of early out-of-home care received. Analyses using partial least squares (PLS) analyses showed that children were more compliant in the task situation at 40 months when they had experienced high quality care at home, when they were older, and when they had experienced less out-of-home care prior to 24 months of age. Variations in maternal behaviour in these settings were predicted by the same set of variables, suggesting that parent-child harmony, rather than compliance, was being studied. No consistent dimension of compliance was evident at 28 months.