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The quality of care infants receive is of special interest because experiences in the first year or two of a child's life are particularly formative: they establish the fundamentals of language and cognitive functioning. Verbal and cognitive stimulation by a child's caregivers in the first 2 years may have a pronounced effect on later language and cognitive competence.

Recent research indicates that the quality of child care is a reasonably consistent predictor of children's cognitive and language performance, according to UW-Madison education professor Deborah Vandell and colleagues in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Child Care Research Network.

The frequency of language stimulation appears to be a particularly important component of such care giving, especially during the first 2 years of life.

Vandell and colleagues found that the amount of time children spend in child care, in and of itself, bears no consistent relation to cognitive and language development. Children in many hours of child care did not differ significantly from those in few hours of care. This research provided no indication that early and extensive child care, in and of itself, is either deleterious or advantageous for children's cognitive and language development.

Consistent with other research, this study found that children in child care centers performed at higher levels than children in in-home care. In this study, the longer children were in centers, beginning at age 6 months, the better they performed on cognitive and language measures, when the positive care giving ratings and frequency of caregiver-child verbal interactions were comparable to quality in child care home settings.

Center care appears to provide some advantages over child care homes for cognitive and language development, perhaps because children in centers are typically exposed to a more diverse array of language models, a richer language environment, and greater opportunities to encounter developmentally stimulating materials and events than are children in less formal settings. Children in centers are also more apt than those in child care homes to be exposed to same-age peers, and the group setting may make more demands on children to use language to meet their needs.

The most advantageous environment for cognitive and language development appears to be in a child care center with high levels of sensitive and linguistically stimulating care.

For more information see "The Relation of Child Care to Cognitive and Language Development," in the journal Child Development, July/August 2000, Vol. 71, No. 4, pages 960-980.