Children in Three Types of Day Care: Daily Experiences, Quality of Care and Developmental Outcomes

The effects of three different types of high and low quality child care were examined in the Canadian Victoria Day Care research project: Licensed family day care, unlicensed family day care and licensed center care. Several confounding factors made interpretation of results difficult (such as quality of care and quality of family life. Children from low-resource families (lower education, income and occupation levels) were enrolled in family day care homes with the lowest quality ratings, watched more television, and had fewer reading and informational activities. The variability of unlicensed family day care homes was the greatest. The mean language scores for children in high quality homes were higher than for children in low quality family day care homes.