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What's The Research On...?

Child Care, Family, and Community

Most children spend considerable time in some kind of child care outside the home. Because the quality of care they receive shapes their later development in school and at home, it’s important to evaluate the quality of infant care programs, pre-school programs, and after-school programs. WCER studies of child care quality nationwide have drawn some generalizations about quality of care (for example, parents of children attending for-profit after-school programs report lower satisfaction than do parents of children attending nonprofit programs located in schools and operated by community centers). It’s been found that children in higher quality child care programs perform better on measures of social, language, and cognitive development than children who attend poorer quality settings, but there is considerable variability across the country in state regulated child care. High quality infant care is more likely to occur with small numbers of children in the child care arrangement, with small child-to-adult ratios, and when caregivers have less authoritarian beliefs about child rearing. Studies of school-family relations have shown that students benefit when their parents support them and when their parents participate in supportive networks. A program called Families and Schools Together, developed at UW-Madison, draws parents into the school and helps them create networks with each other that support their children’s academic development.