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Data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care were used to assess whether regulable features of child-care homes affect children’s development. Child-care homes selected were those in which there were at least two children and the care provider received payment for child care (ns=164 when the study children were 15 months old, 172 at 24 months, and 146 at 36 months). Caregivers who were better educated and had received more recent and higher levels of training provided richer learning environments and warmer and more sensitive caregiving. Caregivers who had more child-centered beliefs about how to handle children also provided higher quality caregiving and more stimulating homes. In addition, when settings were in compliance with recommended age-weighted group size cut-offs, caregivers provided more positive caregiving. Quality of care was not related to caregivers’ age, experience, professionalism, or mental health, or to the number of children enrolled in the child-care home or whether the caregivers’ children were present. Children with more educated and trained caregivers performed better on tests of cognitive and language development. Children who received higher quality care, in homes that were more stimulating, with caregivers who were more attentive, responsive, and emotionally supportive, did better on tests of language and cognitive development and also were rated as being more cooperative. These findings make a case for regulating caregivers’ education and training and for requiring that child-care homes not exceed the recommended age-weighted group size.

Five-year-old children (n = 31) watched a brief videotaped segment from a movie with their mother, discussed the movie story with her, and then retold it to an experimenter. The quality of the stories the children told was related to the scaffolding strategies used by their mothers. Children whose mothers focused their own and the children’s attention on the story, prompted the children’s memories with questions and explanations, talked about the characters’ emotions, corrected the children’s mistakes, and engaged in extended exchanges about critical topics in the story during the preparatory discussion told significantly better stories than children whose mothers did not use such strategies and children in a control group (n = 14) who did not discuss the story with their mothers. Children’s recall of objective actions in the story was most strongly predicted by joint mother-child attention, extended exchanges on critical topics, and the mother’s correction of the children’s mistakes. Children’s comprehension of characters’ internal states was most strongly predicted by the number of questions the mother asked, extended exchanges, and correction. These findings have implications for how adults can promote children’s ability to understand, remember, and narrate a story.

In his article “The ‘Effects’ of Infant Day Care Reconsidered”, Belsky (1988) concludes that maternal employment puts infants at risk for developing emotional insecurity and social maladjustment. After a review of Belsky's and other research, this article offers a different conclusion. It is agreed that infants whose mothers work full-time during their first year are consistently and statistically significantly more likely than infants of mothers who work part-time or not at all to be classifed as insecurely attached when such infants are observed with their mothers in the Strange Situation. However, the difference is not large (8% greater probability), and it does not necessarily reflect emotional maladjustment. It is based on a single assessment procedure with a single partner, a procedure in which day-care infants may feel more comfortable than do other infants. Observations of heightened aggression in children who have been in day care as infants offer limited evidence of maladjustment as a consequence of maternal employment. But, there is no clear evidence that day care places infants at risk. Belsky suggests that observed day-care effects on attachment and aggression may be moderated by day-care quality; children's age, sex, and temperament; hours of separation from mother; overstimulation by mother; and congruence between the mother's attitude and work status. However, there is no convincing evidence that these factors are involved. The most promising factors to be used in accounting for individual differences in daycare infants' emotional development are the mother's attitude toward the infant, her emotional accessibility and behavioral sensitivity, and her desire for independence (her own and the infant's). What is needed now is research to assess and investigate such mediating factors, rather than blanket generalizations about day-care effects and implicit or explicit condemnations of maternal employment.

This article describes the issues in early childhood education that were most pressing during the past two decades. It indicates whether each issue has been settled and outlines urgent new issues for today. In 1967 the most salient issues were the importance of early childhood for education, when early education should begin, whether it could compensate for childhood experience at home, and whether the effects of early education were permanent. In 1972 the central issue was the best kind of early educational program. By 1977 attention had shifted to ways that early education could be done most efficiently and cheaply, whether parent education was the answer, and how it worked. By 1982 a new issue had arisen: the effects of full-time day care on preschool children's development. Today's most pressing issues seem to be finding ways to maximize the fit between programs and participants, the implications of the superbaby trend, and the effects of day care on infants' development.