Child Care Instability Affects Social Development: UNC

How are young children affected when they bounce around from one child care setting to another? UNC researchers have an answer.

Led by investigator Mary Bratsch-Hines, a new study from UNC’s Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute suggests that disruptions in child care can have a negative effect on social development, as early as age 4 – but those negative effects are generally not very large.

And there’s almost no effect when children experience changes within a child care setting – so if there’s a lot of staff turnover at your child’s daycare, for instance, you shouldn’t have to worry too much.

Children who keep moving from one child care setting to another, though, can sometimes be affected – and those effects can show up as early as pre-kindergarten. The study found that pre-K teachers were more likely to give lower marks on social development to kids who experienced more changes in child care settings.

Of course parents often have to switch child care providers – and the effects of switching appear to be small, regardless. But the study suggests that it’s worth trying to maintain stability if possible. Bratsch-Hines says child care subsidies are often tied to a parent’s employment, for instance, so parents end up having to move their kids if they have to change jobs. Changing the subsidies, she says, might help parents keep their kids in stable child-care settings, even if their own job situation changes.

Bratsch-Hines and her colleagues drew their findings from data in FPG’s Family Life Project; they studied nearly 1300 young children living in rural areas with high poverty rates. They published their study this fall in the journal Early Childhood Research Quarterly.

Read the full article here.

Child Care Instability Affects Social Development: UNC

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