Is Parenting Quality Affected by Age of Entry into Child Care in Norway?

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

Integrative Statement

Early reports from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 1999; 2003) raised concerns that early and extensive nonparental child care had negative effects on the quality of mother-child interactions across infancy and early childhood. These reports were based on conventional regression analyses, conditioning on covariates (i.e., controlling for a host of child, parent, and family characteristics). To an increasing extent, studies in child development have been concerned with the limitations of this methodology for capturing causal effects (e.g., Duncan et al., 2004; Miller, 2016). If unobserved characteristics or processes influence both the predictor and outcome of interest, results based on these types of estimates may be biased. A re-analyses of the data used in the initial reports, taking unobserved coufounding into account by using within-famliy change models (fixed-effects), did not find support for the initial main-effects conclusions by the NICHD ECCRN (Nomaguchi & DeMaris, 2013).

In the present study, we expanded the investigation of consequences of early non-parental child care for parenting quality to Norway. Norway has universal coverage of full time subsidized Early Childhood Education and Care from age one, but variations in age of entry are found in part due to parental choice and in part due to September 1 enrollment requirements. The enrollment policy, through which age of entry is in part a function of birth month (children born close to the main uptake are more likely to enter earlier), allows us to use instrumental variable estimation (IV). IV mimics randomization when allocation to treatment (i.e., age of entry) is in part not a function of parental choices (see Gennetian et al., 2008, for an introduction of IV to developmental psychology).

Data is from the Behavioral Outlook—Norwegian Developmental Study (BONDS), following 1157 children from age six months. Parenting quality was observed in mother-child interactions at age 2 and father-child interactions at age 3, and subsequently coded with rating items used by the NICHD Study of Early Child Care.

We found no evidence, in either conventional conditional regression models or in IV models, that age of entry was related to the quality of parenting in either mothers (at child age 2 years) or fathers (at child age 3 years) in this sample of Norwegian families. Moreover, there was no evidence of interactions with family demographic characteristics. In sum, age of entry into non-parental child care is unrelated to parenting quality in Norway, regardless of estimation techique used.

Authors

• Margaret Tresch Owen, University of Texas at Dallas
  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
  Non-Presenting Author