What is Early Care & Education

EC&E Meets Family Needs
Children's Brain Development and EC&E
EC&E and Equity for Women
EC&E and the Needs of the Workforce
EC&E and More Children Left in Non-Parental Care
EC&E is an Economic Issue, Not Just a Social Issue
Lack of an Infrastructure for EC&E
EC&E and Image Issues

Who Needs Child Care & Why
Types of Child Care

Early Care and Education can be defined as the full range of services used by families to educate and nurture children, particularly those from birth through 5, and those that allow parents to work and/or attend school. The impact of EC&E upon children and their families has far-reaching implications for issues of gender equality, economic outlook, local and national politics, and ultimately, our global community. A growing number of Americans are concluding that our services to its children and families constitute a national crisis, perhaps one of the greatest domestic problems our nation has ever faced.

Decades of research now affirm that early care and education programs result in economic and social advantages. Economically, the country benefits from the increased productivity of working parents whose children are in high-quality care. Society benefits economically and socially when dollars invested in young children save future expenditures for adult incarceration or welfare. Society also benefits when EC&E programs contribute to the development of socially responsible and productive adults. Below is an examination of each of these issues in more detail to promote further understanding of the necessity and importance of EC&E.

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EC&E Meets Family Needs
The demand for child care has skyrocketed over the past 30 years. More women and men are in the work force, either as members of two-paycheck families or as single parents. Low-income, working parents often need child care subsidies to make ends meet. Welfare recipients will need child care to enter or re-enter the work force due to work requirements initiated through welfare reform. During the first year of welfare reform (1998-99), Santa Barbara County saw a 15.4% increase in requests for child care referrals. During that same period, there was a 39% increase in requests for "other child care related information," such as subsidized child care, and how to navigate through the complex child care delivery system. Quality early care and education impacts families directly by providing safe, healthy environments for children. In turn, this decreases the potential for parental stress or concern about their children's out-of-home environment. Thus, early care and education encompasses family support and health, as well as educational services for children.

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Children's Brain Development and EC&E
Quality environments contribute significantly to children's development. There is growing recognition that quality EC&E programs are important precursors of children's school success and later success in life. In part, this is due to the fact that early care and education programs have an impact precisely at the point when children's development is rapid, dramatic, and multi-dimensional.

Neuroscientists have established, for example, that the way the human brain develops during the first years of life has a significant impact on later learning and intellectual growth. Brain development during this period is quite susceptible to environmental influence, including the kind of care and stimulation that children receive at both in and out of home settings.

High quality early care and education programs offer a good start in life by helping children engage in relatively complex play, socialize comfortably with adults and other children, and develop important physical, language, and cognitive skills. Many of these positive effects linger and contribute to children's increased cognitive abilities, positive classroom learning behaviors, long-term school success, and even improved likelihood of long-term social and economic self-sufficiency. In contrast, children attending lower-quality programs are more likely to encounter difficulties with academic and social development and are less likely to reach expected levels of development. Poor quality programs also undermine the development of children's skills. Youngsters in poor quality programs, irrespective of family income, demonstrate less language and pre-mathematics ability and less positive self-perception than children in higher quality classrooms.

This knowledge has enormous implications for assessing the quality of early care and education and has led to a child care approach that emphasizes enhancing the child's environment in order to stimulate brain development.

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EC&E and Equity for Women
Reliable child care is indispensable to the principles of gender equity. While remarkable progress has been made toward equal opportunity for women to experience the benefits of employment, those opportunities are often restricted by inadequate child care options. Women still bear the brunt of child-rearing responsibilities, and that includes the constraints created by unsatisfactory child care.

A substantial percentage of working women have misgivings about their child care arrangements. Among families with employed mothers, 30% report that they would switch to a different child care arrangement if they could. At the same time a substantial percentage of non-working women wish that they were working and cite inadequate, inaccessible, or unaffordable child care as a key reason for not working. National studies demonstrate that, as child care costs increase, women are less likely to work outside the home.

What happens to child care arrangements when a child is sick? Regular child care facilities are unequipped or prohibited from caring for very sick children throughout the day. Under such circumstances, parents (usually mothers) have few choices but to leave work when a child becomes ill. Working mothers often must choose between extra time at the office and extra time with their children, a business trip and the usual routines at home, as well as a fast-track career and a less challenging, lower-paying job. These difficult choices are exacerbated by the potential impact upon a woman's financial earnings, self-esteem, the respect of her boss and her peers, the love of her spouse or relevant other and, of course, the comfort of her children.

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EC&E and the Needs of the Workforce
Child care is one tool for stimulating employment, providing a necessary service so that working parents can enter or remain a part of the work force. Inadequate or undependable child care contributes to decreased work productivity and increased absenteeism and tardiness. Conversely, employer policies that support employees' needs for work/life balance, such as flex-time, dependent care allowances, and child care vouchers increase productivity and worker loyalty. For children, the long-term effect of good quality early care and education services will be seen in improved education levels and increased competency and skill levels when those children enter the workforce.

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EC&E and More Children Left in Non-Parental Care
The demand for child care has grown dramatically in recent years. Each day 13 million American children are dropped off in early care and education centers or family child care homes. Many parents place their children in group day care centers, which care for relatively large numbers of children in a nonresidential setting. Other parents rely on family day care providers, who care for one or more children in the provider's home, which is adapted for child care use. Still other parents turn to relatives, neighbors, or friends. A relatively small number hire a nanny or an au pair. Infants and toddlers constitute the fastest-growing subgroup of children in early care and education programs: half of all infants under the age of one are in some form of non-maternal care, most for 30 or more hours per week.

Though resources for early care and education are increasing, they are not keeping up with current and projected demand. The most severely affected are children in low-income households, who now account for one-quarter of all children. Only 50% of children living in households of $10,000 or less regularly attend early care and education programs, compared to over 75% of households with incomes in excess of $75,000.

The single most significant reason for the growth of child care demand in the United States is the dramatic increase in female employment. Labor force participation among women with children under six has increased from 39% in 1975 to 60% in 1994.

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EC&E is an Economic Issue, Not Just a Social Issue
Not enough resources are entering the EC&E system. As a result, the system is stressed and inadequate services abound. Yet we know that high quality early care and education programs can shape brain development and therefore, personality patterns. Children attending lower quality programs are more likely to have difficulties with social development and are less likely to reach expected levels of development. Resources, time and energy that are routed to early care and education can mean lower expenditures on juvenile justice programs, the prison system, and welfare programs. Economically, this is a sound decision for our future.

In contrast to all leading industrialized nations, the U. S. falls behind in ensuring the provision of paid parental leave, pre- and post-natal care for mothers and infants, and adequate child care. Each year, American taxpayers reach deep into their pockets to meet the costs, both direct and indirect, of policies that are based on remediation rather than prevention.

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Lack of an Infrastructure for EC&E
Parents across the country are profoundly affected by the ways in which individual programs, and the early care and education system as a whole, are funded, organized, and governed. They do not have easy access to information on the relative merits of alternative child care arrangements, facilities, or providers. There is a classic "market failure;" parents cannot satisfy their preferences without investing significant time in the search processes. Even after locating child care, parents are unable to effectively monitor facilities and providers.

Despite the growing demand for early care and education, federal, state, and local responsibilities are not clearly delineated. EC&E programs have emerged haphazardly and have been funded erratically; they have emanated from different legislative mandates, funding streams, regulatory systems, administrative systems, and agencies. Some programs fall under the jurisdiction of state departments of education, others under departments of health, and still others are run by departments of welfare or social services. In fact, a recent study documented 90 different federal programs sitting in 11 federal agencies and 20 offices. State-supported programs are just as inconsistent, varying from state to state and even within states.

Informational overlaps and gaps exist in eligibility, fees, programming, and other crucial issues, raising practical dilemmas for families and policy dilemmas for decision-makers at all levels. Lack of a coordinated early care and education infrastructure has resulted in inadequate support for the following: resource and referral agencies, parent information and engagement, data collection, planning, governance and evaluation, practitioner professional development and licensing, facility licensing, enforcement and improvement, program accreditation, and other quality improvement activities.

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EC&E and Image Issues
Over the last decade, scholars have argued persuasively that the quality crisis in early care and education may also be rooted in the profound ambivalence within American culture toward mothers and their care-taking roles. On the one hand, we revere the primacy and privacy of motherhood and family, resisting policies and programs that appear to intervene in domestic life. Indeed, many Americans continue to believe that out-of-home care is harmful, despite evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, some dismiss the care of children as mindless, custodial work, devaluing the contributions of stay-at-home mothers as well as paid caregivers. We pursue national policies that lead to non-parental care for an increasing number of young children by favoring "workfare," for example, or by not providing paid parental leave.

Those entering the field of early care and education face very real career challenges. Child care workers have only just begun to think of themselves as professionals and have not made much headway in persuading others that they should be thought of as such. In terms of pay and prestige, child care is anything but a privileged profession. While society has begun to shift its thinking about education as not just a private good, but a public good for society as a whole, that shift has scarcely begun to occur in the collective public consciousness toward child care. It is widely accepted that children between the ages of six and eighteen should be educated outside the home. The notion that children under the age of six should be cared for outside the home has not yet achieved a similar consensus.

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SBCCCPC Strategic Plan
KIDS Network Scorecard

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