ExchangeEveryDay Past Issues

The ExchangeEveryDay message on November 17, "Type of Care May Impact Achievement," caused a bit of a stir in the family child care community. In part it stated…

"A study released in August, 2005 by Professors Raquel Bernal of Northwestern University and Michael Keane of Yale University shows that this informal care may negatively influence a child's mental development. Center-based or formal care, however, may offset negative effects of a mother's reduced contact time with her child."

While the editors of ExchangeEveryDay believe that the researchers were comparing center-based care to informal babysitting by family and friends, other implications could be easily drawn. In fact, Maria West wrote to ExchangeEveryDay:

"While I very much appreciate hearing the current research, this one worries me. I am a family child care provider and am beginning to do some training for other providers. Last night I worked with providers who are serving low income children. Some of these providers felt very strongly that someone in power wants them out of business. One or two believed there is a strong movement to get children out of family child care homes and into centers…

"I also question the researcher's premise that we can measure a difference in a child's development and correlate that difference with the type of care they receive. I imagine that kith and kin and less formal care may meet the needs of certain families at certain times... I believe that the measures used to compare different types of care should be made very explicit when we are drawing conclusions for policy making. It is critical that the measures are broad-based, including social/emotional, physical, as well as cognitive, and that they look at how a child's, family's, and community's needs are being met. If this is not the case, we need to be careful about the implications we draw."

Editors Response: While we do not believe there is an organized movement afoot to undercut family child care providers, we do concur that researchers and editors are often not fully cognizant of the differences between center care, family child care, and informal babysitting. Sometimes all of these forms of care are lumped together as "child care," and often family child care is confused with care by untrained, unsupervised babysitters. Such sloppiness in research and publishing can demean the hard work and valuable contributions of family child care professionals.

While Exchange magazine was founded as a resource for center directors, in recent years we have been reaching out to address the concerns and contributions of family child care professionals. We are proud to include the National Association for Family Child Care as an Exchange Strategic Partner. And, we will celebrate our commitment to family child care by featuring family child care professionals on the cover of the January issue of Exchange.

We plan to respond to Maria West’s justifiable concerns by ensuring that ExchangeEveryDay presents a balanced range of research about all forms of care and early education, and to note, where appropriate, the significant role family based care plays in the role of young children and their families."

We invite you to participate in this dialogue by providing your recommendations on research we should investigate that addresses family child care or your general views on family child care in today’s Sound Off feature at http://mail.ccie.com/go/eed/878

Contributed by Michael Kalinowski and Roger Neugebauer

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