UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) A Comparative Exploration of the Pedagogical Quality of Parent-Led Child Care Centers and Regular Child Care in The Netherlands

Research Findings: This small-scale study features the 1st comparative exploration of the pedagogical quality of parent-led child care and regular child care in The Netherlands. The quality of the interaction skills and the affective relationships between adults and children was evaluated and compared with those of regular child care centers. On average parents in parent-led child care had interactions with adequate to good sensitive responsiveness, respect for autonomy, structuring and limit setting, and verbal communication. Developmental stimulation and fostering positive peer interactions proved to be weaker areas. Parents’ perceptions of the affective relationship with children in the group were characterized by a high level of closeness and a low level of dependency and conflict. Parents experienced a greater degree of closeness but also more conflict and in particular greater dependency with their own children than with the other children. A comparison between parent-led centers and regular urban child care centers revealed some small but significant differences in pedagogical quality. Practice or Policy: Parents can play a more active role in both the design and implementation of child care. It seems interesting to pilot new child care formats in which parents and professional staff collaborate more closely. The child care system in many countries is centered on a mainstream model of professional child care suppliers with parents as consumers. However, in some countries, alternative forms of child care have emerged in the margins of this dominant model. For example, parental preschool cooperatives were introduced in Canada (Prentice, 2006) and the United States (Coontz & Esper, 2003) as early as 1915, serving as playgroups or socialization groups for children similar to church groups (Lewsader & Elicker, 2013; Sosinsky, Lord, & Zigler, 2007) or mixed-age homeschooling groups (Guterman & Neuman, 2018; Kunzman & Gaither, 2013). These cooperatives went on to inspire parents in European countries (Gofen & Blomqvist, 2014). In various European countries, forms of cooperative care date back more than 40 years, with parents actively participating in the management of, the coordination of, and/or interaction with the children in the group (see Pestoff, 2006; Vamstad, 2012), like the crèches parentales in France, the oudercrèches in Belgium, the Eltern-Kita in Germany, and some forsköle in Sweden. In The Netherlands, parent-led child care (PLC) centers (ouderparticipatiecrèches), in which parents play an autonomous role, have offered an alternative to standard child care for 40 years. Offering child care services for younger children (0–4 years) in a center-based setting is a shared characteristic of Dutch PLC and regular child care, but a striking CONTACT Ruben G. Fukkink R.G. Fukkink@uva.nl Research Institute of Child Development and Education, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Achtergracht 127, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. EARLY EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT 2019, VOL. 30, NO. 1, 98–113 https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2018. 1514844 difference is that parents, instead of professional caregivers, care for the children in PLC. Furthermore, the composition of groups is different from that of regular day care groups, because the groups in cooperative child care include both parents’ own children and children from other families. Different forms of cooperative child care can be identified based on the degree of parental involvement in the design (i.e., management and pedagogical policy) and implementation (i.e., taking care of the children) of this public service (see Brandsen & Honingh, 2016). Cooperative care affords parents in different countries an individual role alongside that of other pedagogical professionals, such as the rural parent cooperatives in America (see Coontz & Esper, 2003), the parent-led service in New Zealand (Mitchell, Tangaere, Whitford, & Mara, 2006), and the Canadian cooperatives, in which only a small percentage of child care centers expect parental participation in the groups (Prentice, 2006), and in European examples of cooperative care, in which parents participate in regular activities and sometimes perform menial or cleaning tasks but work alongside professional staff (Vamstad, 2012). In the Dutch context, the organizational model of PLC is autonomous and devoid of further involvement of pedagogical professionals. In Dutch PLC—in contrast to other international variants of cooperative care—parents bear complete responsibility for the management, daily coordination, and care of the group. They are involved in pedagogical policy; coordinate the daily running of the center; and take turns participating in the groups, which comprise both their own children and other parents’ children. To use the terminology of Brandsen and Honingh (2016), the parents do not have a complementary role but have full control regarding both the design and implementation of the child care service. The Dutch PLC model therefore moves beyond other international forms of cooperative care. The existence of alternative types of child care alongside mainstream child care in different regions of the world evokes the question of whether regular and alternative types of child care offer similar or different pedagogical quality to young children in the preschool period (0–4 years). The limited scientific publications on parental cooperative care have focused on describing the historical and social context of this care. The pedagogical quality of alternative types of child care has rarely been studied, despite its importance for the development of young children and, related to this, its relevance for the child care choice parents face. In this study, we evaluate the pedagogical process quality of Dutch cooperative care by conducting a comparative assessment of the quality of Dutch PLC and regular child care centers. The Dutch context of PLC The Dutch founders of PLC strongly believed that raising children in a group setting with various children and adults would stimulate children’s development and socialization. Equally important, they emphasized the importance of parents sharing responsibilities regarding raising children, often indicated with collective upbringing (Bergwerff, 2015). Currently PLC is linked to the concept of the pedagogical civil society, which is characterized by citizens who are willing to provide mutual support in informal social networks (see Kesselring, de Winter, Horjus, van de Schoot, & van Yperen, 2012). The concept of the pedagogical civil society is concretized in PLC, as parents share child care responsibilities for their children and arrange child care for one another’s children (Bergwerff, 2015). All Dutch early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings, including PLC, are required to work according to four predefined general pedagogical goals: to provide children with a safe andcaring environment, to support the development of children’s personal competencies, to support the development of children's social competencies, and to transmit norms and values. However, there is no national curricular framework for regular child care centers or PLC centers (see Fukkink, 2017, for background information on Dutch ECEC). A typical daily program of a child care center in The Netherlands consists mostly of free play, with little time allotted to structured educational EARLY EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT 99