Further to the government’s report on Non Parental Childcare and Child Cognitive Outcomes at Age 5. part of the Growing Up In Ireland study…

Liggy writes:

The Irish Independent has published their interpretation of the latest Growing Up in Ireland Study.

Their amazing conclusion was: Child’s development suffers if mum works full-time, says study

Got that? All children suffer if their Mother works full time.

Kind of rude to fathers who do the childcare. Not to mention how outdated, anachronistic and 1950s the attitude is that Mum should be the one looking after the children.

So I read the report: Amazingly, it made the point in many instances that where a care-giver (in or out of the child’s home) is better educated than the parent who works full-time, the child will have better vocabulary and non-verbal reasoning skills.

So logically if the full time employee is the best educated person in the child’s life, they will not have the same skills in these areas as children of a parent of a similiar educational level who stays at home. Nowhere in the report does it conclude that this role is best played by the Mother.

P8
Looking at change over time in vocabulary scores between three and five, a modest positive effect was found for non-relative care (e.g. childminders), meaning that children in this type of care made more progress between the two time points than those in full-time parental care at age three.

It goes on….

Positive effects of centre-based care were also found for the Foundation Stage Profile results at age five, and these were stronger for children with less-educated mothers.

P10
None of the findings suggest a significant negative effect of non-parental childcare on either vocabulary or non-verbal reasoning at five for the full sample of children. On average, children attending different types of care at age three fared as well in terms of cognitive outcomes at age five as children in full-time parental care.

P11
For children whose whose Primary Caregiver had Leaving Certificate qualifications or higher, there was a modest positive effect of relative and non-relative care on change in vocabulary scores between three and  five compared to full-time parental care

P19
At nine months, the authors (Byrne & O’Toole, 2015) found infants in the care of a relative had higher scores for communication and personal/social development, while those in the care of a non-relative had  significantly lower communication and problem-solving scores.

Infants attending centre-based care had significantly lower communication and gross-motor scores than those in full-time parental care. However,  as noted in McGinnity et al (2013), in the majority of cases the children had been in non-parental care for a very short period, and therefore it is not possible to attribute causal relationships.

P74
For children of Primary Caregivers with lower secondary educational qualifications, the first model (Table 4.3) shows that there is no significant effect of any form of non-parental care at age three, compared to  children in full-time parental care, on vocabulary at age five. Adding vocabulary scores at age three (Model 3) does not affect this pattern of results for childcare. There is no evidence of a positive association between non-parental childcare and vocabulary at age five for the children of low-educated Primary Caregivers in  this sample.

For the children of Primary Caregivers with upper secondary education or higher, it was found that all forms of non-parental care at age three years had a significant small positive association with vocabulary scores at age five, but these effects did not remain statistically significant once child and other family characteristics were held constant in Model 2.

Interestingly, in Model 3, home-based care types, relative care and non-relative care are associated with slightly higher increases in vocabulary between ages three and five than sole parental care, though the coefficients were not statistically significant.

This echoes the finding from Hansen and Hawkes (2009) that the children of more highly educated Primary Caregivers show vocabulary gains from home-based care, albeit grandparental childcare in their study using the Millenium Cohort Study. This effect is not found for children in centre-based care.

Download report here