Child Care and Early Education in Australia - the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children

The report addresses a number of questions relating to child care and early education in Australia and contains findings on these topics:• child care and early education attendance patterns for infants and 4 to 5 year-old children• parents’ reasons for using care and satisfaction with their infant or child’s care/education• family, child and community factors related to current attendance at child care and early education services• indicators of quality in formal and informal care/education programs attended by the LSAC infant or child• developmental outcomes, such as health, social and cognitive development, for infants and children in relation to care/education attendance patterns, quality indicators, and other influencing family, child and community factors.Key findings:Parents’ use of infant child care:• Just over one-third (34.9 per cent) of the LSAC parents were using regular child care for their infants; however, the proportion varied by infant age. It was lowest (18.0 per cent) for children 6 months and younger and highest at 48.9 per cent for children older than 12 months. • The majority of the parents using child care (62.1 per cent) accessed informal care provided by relatives, usually grandparents, or non-relatives; 37.9 per cent used formal, government-regulated long day care or family day care services; and 10.0 per cent used a combination of formal and informal care. • There were notable differences in the use of formal and informal care by LSAC families. Long day care centres were more likely to be used by mothers who had a university education, were employed full-time rather than part-time and whose family income was higher. Relative care was less commonly used by older mothers (over 35 years) and more common when there was only one child in the family. Mothers using long day care centres tended to report lower levels of social support, parenting self-efficacy and positive parenting behaviour than mothers using family day care or informal home-based care. • Weekly hours of child care in formal care settings (average of 20 to 21 hours a week) were longer than for informal (average of 14 hours a week). The longest hours in care were experienced by infants attending a combination of formal and informal arrangements (average of 24 hours a week). • Parents typically used child care to enable them to meet their employment, study, family or personal responsibilities.Infant health:• Child care was an important predictor of parents’ report of their infants’ low physical health, particularly for recurrent problems with gastrointestinal, ear and other infections. Infants attending long day care centres were almost twice as likely as children not receiving care to have problems with infections. Home-based child care settings provided by family day care or informal carers were not associated with a higher incidence of infection. • In comparison to child care factors, family demographic, socioeconomic and psychosocial predictors showed relatively few significant associations with infant health outcomes. • When analyses were restricted to infants in regular non-parental child care, poorer health outcomes were highest in the group of infants who attended long day care centres for 21 or more hours per week and lowest in the groups who received one to eight or nine to 20 hours per week of care with relatives.Early education and care services attended by 4 to 5 year-old children:• Almost all 4 to 5 year olds (96.3 per cent) were attending some type of child care or early education service each week, with the vast majority (95.1 per cent) receiving a formal centre or school-based early childhood program. • Children who did not attend formal early childhood programs were more likely to be younger or growing up in families who were more disadvantaged; that is, mothers were less well educated, not employed, and reported higher psychological distress and poorer parenting; families had a lower income, more financial stress and more children in the household; families were lone parent, Indigenous, non–English speaking, or from a more economically-disadvantaged area.Child social development:• Pro-social and problem behaviour outcomes were rated by parents and teachers. Child outcomes were strongly associated with child and family demographic, socioeconomic and psychosocial factors, but only weakly linked to early education/child care factors. Teacher ratings of social development were lower for children who attended more child care settings each week.Child cognitive achievement:• Cognitive achievement was indexed by tests of receptive vocabulary and early literacy and numeracy skills. Child and family demographic, socioeconomic and psychosocial factors were identified in regression analyses as the major predictors of child language outcomes, but early education and child care effects were also noted. • Children who did not attend a formal early childhood program had lower scores for receptive vocabulary than children in pre-Year 1 and preschool programs (whether this was in a single setting or with other additional care), and comparable scores to children in long day care. Children who attended long day care plus other additional care had the lowest scores. The relationship between child care factors and children’s receptive vocabulary appeared to be a function of the amount of time in care rather than type of early childhood setting, as shown by a significant drop in test scores as weekly hours of care/education approached 30 or more hours a week.