1-049 - Non-Parental Child Care: An International Perspective on Patterns of Choice and Methods for Analyses

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Non-parental child care is an integral part of family life throughout most high- and middle income countries. Consequently, parents make choices about their child’s care arangements, related to preferences, availability and opportunities. These choices may have consequences for the child’s development and for the home environment as well, because they define the child’s developmental context and considerable experience outside of the family. They also have implications for how we as researchers address consequences of these experiences, because parental choices may reflect selection mechanisms influencing both child care use and child outcomes.

In this symposium, we take an international perspective on consequences of parental choices of child care for child development, addressing both substantive and methodological issues. The first presentation describes patterns of child care use among young mothers in a high-risk sample in the US, showing differential socioemotional and cognitive development as a function of these patterns. The second presentation addresses long-term consequences of non-parental child care for behavior problems in a Canadian sample, using propensity scores to account for family selection bias, with subsequent sensitivity checks to estimate the robustness of this approach. The third presentation uses instrumental variable estimation to test whether age of entry into child care in Norway has consequences for observed parenting quality of mothers and fathers.

Sub Unit

• School Readiness/Childcare

Chair

• Henrik Daae Zachrisson, University of Oslo

Discussant

• Ann Easterbrooks, Tufts University

Individual Presentations

• Investigating Child Care as a Protective Factor for Children of Adolescent Mothers - Presenting Author: Rachel C. Katz, SRCD Post-doctoral State Policy Fellow, Division of Early Intervention, Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Tufts University; Non-Presenting Author: Ann Easterbrooks, Tufts University

• Early Childcare use and Adolescent ExternalizinBehaviors in a 17-year Population-Based Propensity Score Study - Presenting Author: Massimiliano Orri, McGill University; Non-Presenting Author: Sylvana Côté, University of Montreal

• Is Parenting Quality Affected by Age of Entry into Child Care in Norway? - Presenting Author: Margaret Tresch Owen, University of Texas at Dallas; Non-Presenting Author: Henrik Daae Zachrisson, University of Oslo; Non-Presenting Author: Eric Dearing, Boston College; Non-Presenting Author: Kristin B Nordahl, Norwegian Center for Child Behavioral Development