The Latin American and Caribbean region has experienced a rapid expansion of publicly funded child care provider apps for children under three years of age. In countries such as Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Uruguay, at least 40% of three-year-olds use childcare services and, in some cases, the use of these services among two-year-olds is similar.
The increase in demand in this area responds, in part, to the demographic changes of Latin American families: increased urbanization, less large families and greater participation of women in the labour market. Between 1999 and 2014, female labour participation in the region increased from 58 to 65 %, a change reflected in all educational levels and also among women with children under five years of age.
Although female employment tends to increase family income and child welfare, it raises important questions about early childcare policies.
What is high-quality childcare?
Much has been said about the main elements that characterize quality childcare. Experts often distinguish between structural aspects of quality and process quality.
Structural quality refers to the infrastructure, the availability of materials, the professional qualifications of the staff that takes care of the children and the number of children per caregiver. This aspect is important to ensure adequate safety and hygiene conditions.
The quality of the processes focuses on the nature of the interactions that occur between caregivers and children. Quality interactions with young children have to be frequent, receptive to their interests, rich in language, warm and sensitive to their needs.
According to studies, the quality of the processes is crucial for childcare services to have an impact on child development. As these must be sustainable over time, no concessions should be made on this issue. Unfortunately, the evidence available in Latin America is not very encouraging, since it points to very low levels of process quality.
The relationship between quality of care and child development
In a recent publication, my colleagues and I studied the relationship between process quality and child development. We examined data from the largest provider of public childcare services in urban areas of Peru, the Cuna Más program. We compare the quality of the processes with the children’s development of children from different classrooms in the same centre.
We found that the magnitude of children’s development was 7% greater than a standard deviation when the caregiver offered an additional standard deviation in their process quality. That is to say: the better the quality of the processes, the child development also improves, and increases. On the other hand, we detected that caregivers with more years of education were not necessarily more effective in fostering better child development, but those with more years of experience were.
8 steps to offer quality and scale childcare
1. Expand coverage only if there is a strategy to offer quality services
2. Focus subsidized services only towards children of the poorest and most vulnerable families
3. Offer attractive working conditions to staff
4. Provide mentoring and training as part of the continuous training strategy, so that staff learn to consistently offer quality interactions to the children in their care
5. Implement continuous quality improvement strategies that feed on data in real-time and can trigger positive consequences
6. Strengthen pre-training programs for providers
7. Implement evidence-based curricula
8. Maintain the emphasis on process quality
A more extensive discussion of each of these strategies is found here.
What strategies do you think are the most necessary in your area or country? Which do you think would work best? What other elements are needed to ensure high-quality child development services?
