Effects of mom working during the first year

Child Development recently put out a monograph (sorry, no link; I'm reading an actual hard copy) on the effects on kids of mom working during the first year of their lives. The subjects were non-Hispanic Whites or African American, in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care.

For kids of moms working full time (but not part time), white kids (but not black kids) had significantly lower scores on some (but not all) cognitive measures at 3, 4.5, and in first grade.

But there were some advantages, too: more money, less stress over money (therefore less cortisol flowing in everyone), and putting the kid in a better preschool when she's 3.

The conclusion to the abstract says, "These results confirm that maternal employment in the 1st year of life may confer both advantages and disadvantages and that for the average non-Hispanic white child those effects balance each other." It's a gratifying conclusion, but I wish they had a comma coach.

Another bad effect of stereotyping

You remember the study (sorry, no link) where a bunch of black or white college kids were given a series of tests, and in the first one, the subjects were told the researchers were just calibrating, and it wouldn't be scored. The second group was told it would be scored. The third was told it would be scored by race.

Black men scored the same as white men in the first test, worse in the second, and still worse in the third. As I recall, black women were not (as) effected.

A new study looked at something similar. They had two groups of women do a math test  to "determine whether or not they were capable and smart in math" after getting either supportive or stereotypic messages, and then later they tested them on aggression and self control.

"In these follow-up tests, the women who felt discriminated against ate more than their peers in the control group. They showed more hostility than the control group. And they performed more poorly on tests that measured their cognitive skills," says Inzlicht.

This explains so much. Stopping for Haagen-Dazs after a particularly unhappy job interview. Blowing up at the kid. My only caveat would be that I think they tested the people soon after the stereotyping occurred. It doesn't show that it persists, but I believe it does, when such slights continually occur.

This reminds me of Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, in which he says slaves become lazy and shiftless as a rational response to the condition of slavery.

The lesson for child care and development is not to stereotype kids, but we do with regard to sex, and we probably do with other characteristics, too, such as  income and race. State Preschool and Title 5 programs have to be on watch against teachers who stereotype kids based on the fact that mom brings the kid by bus or  looks tough, or tattered, or frazzled, or doesn't speak English, or wears a headscarf.

Stimulative home and school are equally necessary

An NICHD longitudinal study of 1300 kids looked at the kids' homes, preschool or child care, first grade classroom, and math and reading scores through the fifth grade. When they controlled for socioeconomic status, they found that the kids that did best academically in school were the ones that had stimulative home life, stimulative preschool, and stimulative first grade. Having all three was important. That's not much of a surprise. And since preschool and first grade are sequential, what it means is that home and high-quality school are equally necessary.

It's good to know we can have an effect, but only high-quality child care has this effect. Much of Title 22 does not. So we policy geeks need to work on getting more professional development, including for family child care.

I don't care if they have a BA. I don't care if they have an AA. But I would really like to see all family providers get the content of a community college class in child growth and development spread over a series of workshops held in the evenings or weekends, and I'd like to see all Title 22 center teachers have 12 units of ECE. I think that would make me content with the overall workforce.

Reducing infections a little bit with active yogurt

A study financed by and partially conducted by the Dannon yogurt company (at Georgetown, with a Georgetown lead author) says, "The probiotic yogurt-like drink DanActive reduced the rate of common sicknesses such as ear infections, sinusitis, the flu and diarrhea in daycare children."

The EurekAlert sounds as though it was written by Dannon's marketing department ("Probiotic foods are continuing to increase in popularity and some are marketed for the potential benefits" of the stuff in Dannon's product ... "The study, titled DRINK (Decreasing the Rates of Illness in Kids), was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study – the gold standard in clinical research design").

I hate this type of press release, where objectively it's reputable scientists doing real research at reputable places, and then they run it through a marketing department and make it sound sleazy.

But to the study, they gave 638 kids 3 to 6 a bottle of strawberry DanActive once a day and then sent them off to day care. Half got the real stuff and half got a regular (placebo) yogurt drink.

Researchers found a 19 percent decrease of common infections among the children who drank the yogurt-like drink with L. casei DN-114 001 compared to those whose drink did not have the probiotic. More specifically, those who drank DanActive had 24 percent fewer gastrointestinal infections (such as diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting), and 18 percent fewer upper respiratory tract infections (such as ear infections, sinusitis and strep). However, the reduction in infections did not result in fewer missed school days or activities – also a primary outcome of the study.

So Dannon paid for a study to see if giving little kids their product would make them less sick.  If found that they were sick less frequently, but the degree of relative unsickness wasn't enough to affect their daily activities, including being sent home sick from day care. So if they like it, let 'em have it, but don't think of it as medicine.

I like this study better now, and I see why the marketing flacks had to puff it up: the real story was disappointing to them.

When talking with kids, it's how as much as how much

It turns out that talking to 3- to 6-year olds as full-fledged conversation partners helps the kids develop what the researchers call "academic language."

Children at a primary school need a certain type of language proficiency: academic language. Academic language is not an independent, new language, but is the language that teachers use and expect from the pupils. It enables children to understand instructions and to demonstrate their knowledge in an efficient manner. Academic language is characterised by difficult, abstract words and complex sentence structures. The language often contains a lot of clauses and conjunctions and due to the methods of argument and analysis it has a scientific appearance.

Henrichs demonstrated that children are already confronted with academic language in the nursery school. They already hear a lot academic language from the teacher and are often expected to use academic language themselves. The extent to which academic language is used at home was found to differ strongly between families. An essential aspect is how parents approach their children during conversations. If children are given the opportunity to make meaningful contributions to conversations, they often use characteristics of academic language proficiency naturally. In addition to this, the knowledge of academic language depends on the extent to which parents read to their children, tell them stories and hold conversations about interesting subjects. 

I guess this study tells us something about why kids in high-quality preschool are better prepared for kindergarten than other kids and why kids from higher socio-economic status (to a point) know more words when they get to preschool than poorer kids. The second factor is more important than the first.

I guess it's not surprising that a mother with more education will talk to her kids differently than a mother with less, and the topics of conversation will be different. I wonder if there is a difference in amount of conversation as well.

But for child care providers, the message is to do what they've been doing, converse with the kids.

Effects of high-quality child care persist into high school

Oh, boy, the new Child Development is out, but their website won't give me access to the full articles, for some reason, though I'm logged in, so I have to rely on Eurekalert's reporting.

The first article uses the  NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development to track the effects of child care to age 15. They found modest improvements in academics and behavior in kids who were in high-quality care compared with lower-quality care, and kids who spent the most time in any kind of child care self-reported more impulsiveness and risk taking at 15. "High-quality care was characterized by the caregivers' warmth, support, and cognitive stimulation of the children under their care."

The study's findings were consistent among boys as well as girls. In addition, previous studies had suggested that child care could have benefits for children from economically disadvantaged homes. So the researchers created a risk index with such factors as family income, the mother's level of education, and mothers' reports of depression symptoms, dividing their group into three based on risk. Both the achievement and behavior patterns they had found were consistent across all three groups.

In other words, the kinds of effects child care and high-quality child care have been shown to have at 4 or 5 continue at least through age 15. Because it is a tenet of my child-development world view that kids with  poor, uneducated, or depressed moms benefit more from high-quality child care than others, I would expect the effects to be greater among those kids, but they weren't, which means I will need to rethink some policy positions that follow from that. That's the bad part about believing in evidence. You have to keep rethinking things.

$300,000 a year for a preschool director (but that includes benefits)

Ron Williams is executive director of an NAEYC-accredited preschool program with two sites in Paterson, New Jersey. He is site director of one of them. They care for 350 to 375 kids at the two sites on a budget of $4.3 million, of which $4.2 million is state or federal subsidy. After 16 years there, during which he took the program from 15 kids to its current size, he makes $300,000 a year, including pension and benefits.

There is no suggestion of illegality (although his wife is vice-president of the board that sets his salary, and the preschool itself was founded by a church whose pastor later became a corrupt politician, convicted of bribery). Other local directors with similar-size programs make about half as much.

I have mixed feelings about this. I think the real problem is not that he makes twice as much as he should but that the others make half as much as they should. One thing that would make me trust him or not is how much the teachers make. If the preschool has a high wage in general, cool. If the teachers in his preschools make $20 an hour, let Williams have his 300 grand. If not, he's probably just greedy, although he has stuck around a preschool for 16 years. He he were just a scammer, he wouldn't be running an accredited program.

We have people in California running quality programs for that many kids. I wonder how much they make.

Sending kids home sick

Title 22 says you can't keep a sick kid in your center. But how sick is sick enough to send home? The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Public Health Association put out some guidelines, got some states to endorse them, and then asked center directors (in Milwaukee, where the state has endorsed the guidelines) about kids with "cold, conjunctivitis, gastroenteritis, fever and tinea capitis (a scalp infection)," none of which should get a kid sent home, according to the guidelines.

The researchers found that overall, directors would unnecessarily exclude 57 percent of children with mild illnesses. Responses ranged from eight percent of directors unnecessarily excluding a child with a cold, to 84 percent of directors unnecessarily excluding a child with tinea capitis. Directors with greater child care experience and directors of larger centers made fewer unnecessary exclusion decisions.

It looks to me as though 84% of the directors didn't know what tinea capitis is and so erred on the side of caution.  It also looks as though a lot of directors don't know what to do about more common illnesses.

It's hard. You don't want to violate licensing regs, and you don't want to make other kids sick, but you also don't want to mess up working parents' child care. Staying home from work with a sick kid can cost people money they can't afford. So I guess the summary is that everything is hard, and directors should be aware of the rules and guidelines affecting their chosen managerial role and do their damned job.

24/7 child care at naval base

The naval air station at Coronado, near San Diego, is building a child care center that will be open 24/7. Cool. Can you imagine how much that will cost to operate? At an NAEYC-accredited center (as all military centers have to be)?

Worst provider nominee: drugging the kids to sleep better

Two "former" workers at Covenant Apostolic Church Day Care in Cincinnati day care gave over-the-counter melatonin to kids to help them sleep at naptime. They put it in candy. "Parents had told investigators their children often seemed groggy after leaving the day care."  A co-worker told police. They have been charged with misdemeanor child endangering and misrepresentation by a child care provider, which is apparently the worst thing they can find on the books to cover the situation. They face a maximum 18 months in jail.

Worst provider nominee: running over the kids with an SUV

An unlicensed after-school child care center in Cupertino was closed by CCL in October when one of the teachers, who picked up kids at their elementary school, ran over and killed a 5-year-old boy, the only child of older parents, while leaving the center after dropping him of, on her way to take another kid home. I didn't hear about it at the time. Today's news story is that the teacher has been charged with vehicular manslaughter, which the article says is a misdemeanor with a maximum sentence of one year, and transporting a kid without a car seat.

This has so many things wrong with it. Unlicensed commercial child care. Child care providers who drive kids around without car seats. Not making sure the kids who get out of the car were out of the way before driving off. After it happened, going first inside to talk with the boss "for several minutes" rather than to the kid lying on the ground.

New legislation

Just got my weekly child care legislation update, and there are some interesting bills.

• SB 1126 would basically require agreements between CSUs and community colleges so that community college ECE classes would transfer as upper division major classes at CSUs and hopefully UCs.
• AB 2323 would allow CDD contractors to who under-earn to carry over up to 20% of their contract to the next fiscal year. Contractors who over-earn can be reimbursed up to 10% from the following year's funds. This is really cool and is obviously part of the effort to reduce under-earned contracts. I don't have any inside information, but it smells like something CCDAA and CDD would be collaborating on.

One reason these have a chance in hell is they wouldn't cost any money.

People don't like kids with working moms as much

Here's something a child care provider should be aware of: People (in this case undergraduates, all single and 99% childless) judge kids based on the working status of their mothers. Researchers had students watch videos of interviews with women and then the women interacting with their kids. If they thought the woman was either a stay-at-home mom or working part time to balance life and work, the students liked the kid better and thought the woman was a better mom than if they had been told she worked full time.

Okay, these are childless barely adults who think this, so they may not reflect how a child care provider would react. In fact, I would assume child care people to be more empathetic than random undergraduates. I wonder if they do think differently about kids who are in a program for the socialization versus needing child care to go to work. I'd like to see that tested. I'd hate to see them have negative expectations of kids of working moms.

The preschoolization of K-3

I have pissed and moaned about the elementary-schoolization of preschool, by which I mean the tendency of elementary school teachers and administrators to want to make preschool more like kindergarten, which is more and more like first grade, or even second grade.

Well there's some pushback. This report from Linda Jacobson at the New America Foundation says K-3 could benefit by learning something about preschoolers and applying it to K-3 kids. Hear, hear!

It has some interesting numbers I would not have guessed and some that don't make sense together.

•  53% of California 3- and 4-year-olds are eligible for Title 5 programs.
• Of those eligible kids, 53% of 4s and 25% of 3s were enrolled in subsidized programs.
• Calfornia serves12% of its 4 year olds in state Pre-K.
  (This is one of the numbers that doesn't make sense; 53% of 53% is about a quarter, not about an eighth. Unless they mean only State Preschool and do not include CCTR programs, which makes it misleading.)

Of kids 8 and under in California:

• 53% Hispanic
• 28% non-Hispanic white
• 10% Asian
• 5% Black

I'm not really sure about this last one. I just checked some data I recently gathered from my local area association of governments and found that 43% of kids 0-9 in my town are Hispanic.

If 53% of all kids in California are income-eligible for Title 5, tautologically that means 53% are in families with less than 75% of the state median income, which means that on the order of 2/3 of preschool kids are in families in the lower half of incomes. Families with little kids average poorer than families without little kids.

You treat them as what you call them

A recent study surveyed 700 mental health professionals about what what should be done about a made-up case study. In half the surveys, the person was identified as a "substance abuser," and in the other half he was said to have "a substance use disorder."

When the person was called a substance abuser, the survey respondents were more likely to believe it was his own damned fault, and they more often thought punishment was appropriate. When he was said to have a substance use disorder, they more often thought it wasn't all his fault, and treatment was appropriate.

Now apply this to a child care center. If a kid hits other kids, is he a bad kid, who needs to be punished, or does he have a personality disorder that needs to be treated? Which way you describe him may affect how punitive you act. We already know that preschool teachers treat girls differently than they do boys.

This seems to me to be related to how you react when your 2-year-old drops her spoon on the floor over and over, every time you hand it to her. If you think of her as trying to get your goat, you might punish her. If you think of her as learning cause and effect and how to drop stuff, it becomes a moment to watch her grow.

Science Daily article. Drug Monkey analysis.

Child care as a religious ministry

Here's an interesting case in Pennsylvania, yet another case where I don't know all the facts, but that won't keep me from speculating.

In 1997 the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare closed down a Catholic church's child care operation in its basement. They had 20 kids. The state says all child care centers should follow certain developmental goals. The church says that interferes with their religious freedom. An appeals court has just agreed with the state. I don't.

Who benefits from preschool?

I've been mulling this off and on since yesterday, when I discovered that nearly all of the educational benefits from Perry Preschool seen in teenagers are in girls. Perry Boys did better than the control group in other areas (not receiving social services as an adult, not being arrested, and owning their own home at age 27), but virtually all the educational benefits are to girls, and they showed a greater income increase, too. Then yesterday, I noted that a recent study on home visits for newborns showed an effect on arrests for girls but not for boys.

If Perry Preschool results are really valid, then it tells us that our standard way of raising poor black kids in Ypsilanti in the early 1960s damaged girls educationally and boys socially. If we gave them a rich kid's preschool, the girls became better students, and the boys became better integrated into the wider society.

I flippantly said yesterday that this meant we should restrict state preschool to girls, since we get more benefit from it, but the value of turning potential petty criminals into productive members of society is pretty worthwhile, too. Though yesterday's study of in-home visits makes one wonder about that, too.

But it may be that we need different curricula for boys and girls. Maybe we should emphasize things important to education for girls and socialization for boys, because that's where they seem to benefit. Or maybe we should emphasize socialization for girls and education for boys, since that's where they seem to need the most help. I don't know.

But before that, we have to ask how alike are the standard child-rearing practices in Ypsilanti in 1960 and in state preschool neighborhoods now. Lots of things have changed in 50 years. Maybe that has. Maybe the feminist movement or the emphasis on reading to kids has had an effect.

I guess what we'd have to do is study the long-term effects of California state preschool on girls and boys. That must have been done. It's too obvious not to have been done. I guess I'll go look for it. If anybody knows offhand where it is, please let me know.

Teaching 3-year-old boys to write in Britain

The elementary schoolization of preschool is happening in Britain, too. There are several articles in British newspapers about how poorly British boys read poorly compared with girls, and the government is about to order "nurseries and childminders" to spend more time teaching 3- and 4-year-old boys to write. These two cover it best.

The actual cost of child care

A group called Public Policy Forum has put out a report called The Price of Quality: Estimating the Cost of a Higher Quality Early Care and Education System for Southeast Wisconsin. (PDF)

They now spend $5625 per kid, and they estimate it would cost $11,500 a child for best quality, but you could improve on what they have for $8023 per kid.

They figure they are spending $370 million on child care now (mostly wages), and to get to a high-quality system would take about $700 million. And the dish ran away with the spoon.

The report is interesting. It goes over the various studies about long-term effects of good child care and the cost-benefit analyses done.

It makes a stab at defining high quality, and most of the items are generically good (high education and wages, low ratios, and family support. But then they add, "For three‐ and four‐year olds, use of a professionally developed prekindergarten curriculum." I wonder if they could consider Reggio or High Scope a curriculum or a teaching style. This scares me, as I have said before. I fear canned curricula in general and for preschool in particular. Especially if they specify "professionally developed curriculum" but ignore environmental rating scales or teacher-child interaction evaluations. I guess that's because they were just looking at the things that cost money.

I do believe the main point, though. The actual cost of high-quality child care in California as well as Wisconsin is lots higher than CDE reimburses centers. The Title 5 centers that succeed do so on subsidies and grants.

Ventura First 5 creates loan fund

Ventura First 5 is doing a good thing. They are putting $2.6 million into low-interest loans  between $15,000 and $800,000 (with other very nice provisions) to centers for planning, building, buying, or remodeling a center or for refinancing. For-profit businesses and organizations, including child care and school operators, employers and private developers; nonprofit organizations; public and private schools; and public entities are eligible. They expect to fund 4 to 6 projects, depending on what they are presented.

What with banks not lending much at all lately, especially at affordable rates, and the "profit" margins in child care being so slim, this is a real nice thing for Ventura First 5 to do.

While we're sharing good news, at a time when Title 5 centers up and down the state are closing or barely scraping by, Saddleback College is starting a new toddler program. You have to assume the college is subsidizing it. Nobody can run a Title 5 toddler program on the $48.13 per kid per day. (Okay, there are probably some programs that do, maybe in counties with relatively low cost of living, but I'd bet money you can't do it in Orange County.) Anyway, good for Saddleback's administration for agreeing to subsidize it (or good for the center director for pulling the wool over their eyes).