Maternal and non-maternal care in infancy and later child cognitive, language and motor development in Chile: Does type of care matter?

Publication date: 2nd Quarter 2020Source: Early Childhood Research Quarterly, Volume 51Author(s): Marigen Narea, Claudio O. Toppelberg, Matías Irarrázaval, Jiali XuAbstractGrowing numbers of children across the world start non-maternal care in the first year of life. However, few studies have described how different infant care experiences may relate to later child cognitive, language and motor functioning, and most analyses have focused on samples from historically industrialized regions. Cognitive, language and motor subscores (TEPSI) and receptive vocabulary scores (TVIP) obtained through direct testing of 24-to-48-month-old children (n = 7564) from the Chilean Longitudinal Survey of Early Childhood were compared based on retrospective reports of care received as infants. Children who, as infants, had received one of four types of non-maternal care — center-based, grandparent, other relative, and non-relative care — were compared to those who had exclusively experienced maternal care (71.8%). Series of regressions with propensity score models (PSM) were performed. Compared to maternal care, children in center-based care and grandparent care had higher total TEPSI scores (d = .19, p < 0.05) (d = .19, p < 0.01) and TEPSI language subscores (d = .20, p < 0.05) (d = .20, p < 0.01), while those in grandparent care also had higher TEPSI motor subscores (d = .08, p < 0.05). In contrast, children in non-relative...
Source: Early Childhood Research Quarterly - Category: Child Development Source Type: research