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Formal Child Care

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Child care may be known as care for young children, who are supervised by adults who are not their parents. According to an article, Informal child care by relatives, nannies, or home care providers typically takes place in a home setting (either the child’s home or the adult’s home), while formal care by trained and untrained caregivers takes place in school or care centre settings. Child care is now an ordinary part of life for children in most western countries. More than half of infants are placed in some form of child care for at least ten hours during their first year of life, and more than three-quarters of families with young children depend on child care as a support for maternal employment. Formal child care can also provide early …show more content…

Results from a large number of studies demonstrate that child care quality matters. In fact, the importance of child care quality is one of the most robust findings in developmental psychology. Children who experience high-quality child care have higher scores on achievement and language tests, show better social skills and fewer behavioural problems.4 Child care can also function as an intervention for children from at-risk families. Children from families with fewer economic resources who attend quality programs begin school with skills that can increase their chances of academic …show more content…

Some researchers link such a risk with infant child care in particular;5 however, other researchers have failed to replicate this finding, even when using the same data set.6 The NICHD researchers found that the more time children spend in any of a variety of non- maternal care arrangements across the first 4.5 years of life, the more acting-out problem behaviour (ie, aggression and disobedience) and conflict with adults they manifested at 54 months of age and in kindergarten.7 Surprisingly, these findings do not vary as a function of child care quality. It is important to qualify that the effects are relatively small, that most children with extensive child care experience do not have behaviour problems, and that the direction of such effects is not clear ― in other words, parents with more difficult children may enrol their children in child care for more hours. In future work, it will be important to identify the processes through which hours in care may pose a risk. For example, some researchers have speculated that large group sizes (exposure to many peers) may increase the frequency of acting out behaviours that go unnoticed, and therefore uncorrected, by

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