Abstract
This paper examines the short and medium term impact of early childcare provision by grandparents and formal care settings on child cognitive outcomes, using data from the Millennium Cohort Study (UK). Compared with children placed in formal childcare, children cared for by their grandparents are better at naming objects, but perform worse on tests of basic concept development and non-verbal reasoning. These results mask strong heterogeneities. On the one hand, the positive association between grandparental care and child outcomes is stronger for children from more advantaged households; on the other, the negative association is only significant for those from more disadvantaged households. The results of OLS estimations used for our analysis are confirmed using panel methods and an instrumental variable approach.
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Notes
12.5 h per week for 33 weeks per year until 2010, then 15 h per week for 38 weeks.
According to Ofsted (2016), if the person wants to care for children under 8 for more than 2 h a day (and s/he is paid), s/he needs to be registered with Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills). To be registered, one needs to do a training course and a basic first aid course and to have an interview and home inspection. Under a number of exception, childminders are exempt from registration, in particular if they do not receive any payment or if they provide care for children in the children’s home.
In the same period, among the most generous countries in terms of duration are Sweden, Denmark, Italy and some Eastern European countries. The replacement rate is 100% in most European countries, and between 70% and 90% in the others. Only a few have lower replacement rate.
We include three factors derived from analysing a battery of questions through a factor analysis. Examples of questions and answers are: “s/he waves bye-bye on her/his own when someone leaves”, “s/he can pick up a small object using forefinger and thumb only”, “s/he can sit up without being supported”; answers are “often”, “once or twice”, and “not yet”.
The equivalent income is the income of the household taking into account the number of people in the family and assigning weights. The one provided in the MCS follows the OECD equivalence scale, which assigns a value of 1 to the first household member, of 0.7 to each additional adult, and of 0.5 to each child.
The level of education is controlled for by including a dummy variable equal to 1 if the mother completed at least “academic upper secondary education”. This corresponds to having completed at least an “a/as/s level” (GCE Advanced Level) qualification, i.e. a secondary school leaving qualification that leads to higher education.
Scores are standardized according to the child’s age, but within a 3-month interval. Thus, it is preferable to also control for age expressed in months (see Connelly 2013).
In the online Appendix (Table B.1), we present the effects of the type of childcare on cognitive outcomes, progressively adding control variables. This exercise suggests that the results of the baseline specification (without any control variable) are biased, but that we are able to remove most of the bias by controlling for a (large) number of observable characteristics.
Results are similar when dividing the sample by parental education, i.e. a group with no parents with academic upper secondary education and a group in which at least one parent has completed it.
Available as online Appendix (Tables B.3 to B.7).
Unfortunately, we lack information about other modalities of care after age 3, i.e., we cannot show the effect of being cared for by grandparents (where formal care is the excluded category) in the panel analysis, as we did in the previous ones. In this case, the reference category are children with childcare modalities different from formal or childminder, i.e., mainly cared for by parents or grandparents. To get around this issue, we focus only on children in formal care or cared for by grandparents at age 3. In fact, we know that the probability of switching from grandparental care to parental care is rather low (see Tables 5 and 18 for younger children). Thus, we can interpret the results as the effect of being cared for in a formal centre, or by a childminder, compared to being cared for by grandparents.
There are alternative or complementary potential explanations: the moment when the child is placed in formal childcare could coincide with the period when the mother starts working or starts working more, or when other siblings are born. In both cases, when placed in formal care, the child would also be exposed to fewer interactions with the adult at home, for different reasons. However, replicating the estimations with different specifications yields the same results (excluding all children with younger siblings; including the working status and working hours by the mother at different waves), inducing us to exclude those interpretations.
Available upon request.
Longstanding health conditions which limit normal activities concern instead about 2.5% of the sample.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the participants to seminars at Collegio Carlo Alberto, NYU, Dondena (Bocconi), University of Lyon, ISER (University of Essex), University of Turin, International Workshop on Intergenerational Relations (University of Bolzano) and to participants at the 2014 Alp-Pop Conference in La Thuile and the 28th ESPE Conference in Braga for helpful discussions and suggestions. We thank Collegio Carlo Alberto for financial and technical support.
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The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement no. 320116 for the research project FamiliesAndSocieties.
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Del Boca, D., Piazzalunga, D. & Pronzato, C. The role of grandparenting in early childcare and child outcomes. Rev Econ Household 16, 477–512 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-017-9379-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-017-9379-8