Child Care Quality and Child Development in Peru

• In Event: 2-166 - Effective Scalable Models for Interventions to Improve Center-based Care and Education for Preschool-Age Children in LMICs: Progress and Future Directions

Integrative Statement

There is a rich body of evidence on the effects of preschool or child care attendance, especially for the United States, but substantially less is known about how differences in the quality of these services affect child outcomes, and which dimensions of quality are most important. For developing countries specifically, research on child care quality has generally focused on “global” measures of quality -- features such as safety, hygiene, the availability of learning materials, among others -- whereas evidence from the United States suggests that the quality of interactions that take place between caregivers and children is a much more powerful predictor of child development. Earlier work on preschool quality focused on children 3 years of age and older, when evidence in both developed and developing countries showed that developmental gaps between children from poorer and wealthier households appear earlier in life and persist.

This paper contributes to the literature on child care quality by studying the effects of caregiver-child interactions for children between 6 and 24 months of age in Peru. The study focuses on child care centers from the Cuna Más program, targeted to urban areas with a high incidence of poverty throughout the country. Specifically, the study answers the following questions: Do infants and toddlers with caregivers who demonstrate higher-quality interactions have significantly better developmental outcomes? If so, are these effects different along the distribution of child development?

We collected a multilevel dataset in 291 centers, 582 classrooms and their caregivers (2 per center), and 2,198 children aged 6 to 24 months and their families. Our analysis is based on cross-sectional data. Two classrooms in each of the 291 centers were selected at random, so our identification strategy is based on within-center differences in quality and child development. Child development in the areas of communication, problem-solving, and fine motor skills was assessed using the Ages and Stages Questionnaire (third version, ASQ; Squires et al. 2009). The quality of caregiver-child interactions was measured using the Toddler Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS; La Paro et al. 2012).

Children with caregivers who exhibited higher-quality interactions have better development outcomes. Specifically, a one standard deviation higher CLASS score was associated with a 0.07-0.08 standard deviation higher ASQ score. Moreover, the association between the quality of care and child outcomes was significant throughout most of the distribution of child development outcomes, and largest at the bottom.

Authors

• M. Caridad Araujo, Inter-American Development Bank
  Presenting Author

• Marta Dormal, Inter-American Development Bank
  Non-Presenting Author

• Norbert Schady, Inter-American Development Bank
  Non-Presenting Author