Low Income Working Families: Children’s Development and Child Care Quality

This chapter explores variations in cognitive and social-emotional developmental outcomes among the 307 children who participated in the study. Cognitive development for infants and toddlers was assessed directly by researchers, and included early learning skills such as visual reception, fi ne motor, receptive vocabulary, and expressive vocabulary. For preschool-age children, cognitive development was also assessed directly by researchers, and included receptive vocabulary, social awareness (e.g., give name, date of birth), color naming, and counting. Preschool cognitive outcomes also included academic attitudes such as creativity, verbal intelligence, independence, task orientation, and distractibility, assessed by parent and caregiver ratings. Children’s social-emotional development was assessed by caregiver and parent ratings of children’s social competence and problem behaviors (e.g., anger/aggressiveness and anxiety-withdrawal). For a complete description of the child development measures see Appendix A.