Nonparental Care and Early Learning Activities Before Kindergarten: Estimates From the Early Childhood Program Participation Survey of the 2012 National Household Education Surveys Program

• In Event: Roundtable Session 30
  In Roundtable Session: Documenting the Diversity of Children’s Pre-Kindergarten Learning Experiences in the United States: A Portrait Drawing From Three Nationally Representative Surveys

Abstract

With the current policy focus on expanding access to high quality early learning programs it is critical to understand the early education and care settings that children experience prior to kindergarten entry. This paper will take advantage of a recent, nationally representative dataset, the Early Childhood Program Participation (ECPP) Survey of the 2012 National Household Education Surveys Program (NHES:2012), to provide timely information on patterns of participation in different education and care settings prior to kindergarten entry and children’s learning experiences with their families outside education and care settings. This information can help inform policy discussions regarding the availability of learning opportunities for children prior to kindergarten entry.

Early childhood education and care settings are classified into three groups in the NHES:2012: relative care, nonrelative care, and center-based care. Parents reported information on their child’s participation in these types of early childhood education and care settings and provided more detailed information on the characteristics of the primary care arrangement of each type. This paper will present nationally representative cross-sectional estimates of children’s participation in these early childhood education and care settings, including overall estimates of the percentage of children enrolled in relative, nonrelative, and center-based care and the average number of days and hours per week children spent in these settings. These estimates will also be presented by family socioeconomic status indicators such as family income and parental education.

Data from the NHES:2012 will also be used to describe children’s early learning experiences outside of formal and informal education and care settings. Parent-reported information on children’s learning experiences at home will be presented including the frequency of family members reading to the child; teaching the child letters, words, or numbers; and visiting libraries. In addition to these learning opportunities, information on another indicator of the child’s home learning environment, number of children’s books in the home, will also be presented. These estimates will also be presented by family socioeconomic status indicators such as family income and parental education.

The NHES:2012 was a self-administered mail survey conducted from January through August of 2012 using a large-scale nationally representative address-based sample. The ECPP survey contained a sample of children from birth to age six who were not yet enrolled in kindergarten in the spring of 2012. The NHES:2012 was sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics within the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education.

Authors

• Sarah Hastedt Carroll, U.S. Department of Education

• Jeremy Redford, American Institutes for Research