Type of childcare may impact kids' achievement

Type of childcare may impact kids' achievement THE SUN WORKING single mothers who rely on their family, friends, or other informal childcare providers to look after their children during work hours may, in doing so, negatively influence their child's mental development, a new study findings suggest. This negative effect of a mother's reduced contact time with her child may be offset, however, by enrolling the child in pre-school or some other type of formal centre-based care instead, according to the study's authors. "I would say that the crucial thing to take from the paper is that separation from the mother can be detrimental for children, but mothers can partially offset this by choosing the appropriate type of daycare," Professor Raquel Bernal, of Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, told Reuters Health. The findings were presented at the recent 2005 World Congress of the Econometric Society in London. Some single mothers were forced to increase their work time and their use of childcare, which, according to the researchers' analysis, tended to lessen the amount of contact time they had with their children. In light of this, Bernal and co-author, Professor Michael Keane of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, compared single mothers who had children between 1990 and 2000, with those who had children in previous years. Using data collected from 1,519 single mothers involved in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in the States, the researchers looked at the effects of the mothers' use of childcare and their household income on their children's cognitive-ability test scores at ages three to six. Overall, the mother's choice of childcare during their child's first year of life did not seem to affect the child's later cognitive performance, the study findings show. However, achievement scores among children placed in informal childcare after their first year of life were 3.5% lower than they would have been if they had remained in their mother's care or had been placed in some type of formal child care, the researchers estimate. Children who were placed in formal childcare settings, in contrast, did not show any significant reduction in test scores. ? Reuters