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Ecology of Nonparental Child Care - Coggle Diagram

- - - - The terms nursery school, preschool, early childhood education, and child development program are sometimes used to describe certain types of programs for young children. Because all care for children has an impact on their socialization or education, the terms child care or day care will be used to refer to nonparental caregiving.
        
        The availability, affordability, and adequacy of child care has become an increasingly serious concern as more and more parents jointly must contribute to the family income due to the rising cost of living.
- - - - Traditional preschool programs usually provide enrichment activities to children who already get basic intellectual stimulation at home. For children who do not have such an advantage, intervention programs were developed to provide compensation, or amends, for skills these children lack to succeed in U.S. public schools. Most research on the effects of day care on children's cognitive development has focused on intervention programs.
      - In sum, accurately predicting the cognitive, as well as social and behavioral, outcomes of intervention programs is difficult because of the numerous variables that must be taken into account, including quality of the mother-infant relationship, socioeconomic status of the family, educational level of the parents, stress on the family and coping skills, available family supports, temperament and gender of the child, spacing of the siblings, age at which the child enters the program and for how many hours per day, quality of the caregiver-infant relationship, caregiver-parent communication, and quality of the program
      - Mesosystem Influences on Nonparental Child Care
        
        The challenge of the future will be for society to provide more choices in quality child-care services because of the increased need. Links with school, community, government, and business must occur on a greater scale to increase the availability, accessibility, and affordability of child-care options (Smolensky & Gootman, 2003).
        
        School and Community Involvement in Nonparental Child Care
        
        One way to increase child-care options is for the elementary school to extend the hours it is normally in session and to extend its services to include children younger than age 5. A majority of school-age children whose parents are employed care for themselves before and after school. Other children may be cared for by a neighbor. Still others may participate in a community program. Unsupervised children, contrary to popular belief, are not most likely to be found in impoverished, minority communities; rather, self-care is most common when mothers work full-time and parents are divorced or separated, regardless of income (Lamb, 2000).
        
        Government and Business Involvement in Nonparental Child Care
        
        In some societies—for example, China, France, and Belgium—the government totally supports child care, through tax funds, to enable parents to work. In contrast, the current official policy in the United States is that the government will pay for child care (intervention programs) for disadvantaged families, defined by specific criteria, and will give tax credits to other families up to a maximum set by Congress. Some American businesses have become involved in supporting child-care services to attract and keep their employees (Smolensky & Gootman, 2003).
      - Nonparental Child Care and Socialization Outcomes
        
        As has been discussed, there are different types of child care: care provided by an individual in the child's own home (in-home care), care provided in someone else's home (family day care), and care provided in a center either part- or full-time (center-based care). See Table 5.3 for a summary of the socialization effects of types of quality child care. Socialization is affected not only by the type of care, but also by the curriculum implemented (most often found in center-based care).
        
        Some Quality Nonparental Child-Care Curriculum Models and Socialization Outcomes
        
        A curriculum includes the educational goals and objectives of the program, the teacher's role, the equipment and materials, the space arrangement, the kinds of activities, and the way they are scheduled. Content objectives and learning outcomes, knowledge of child development and careful observation of the needs and interests of individual children guide curriculum.
        
        teacher-directed curriculum a curriculum in which the learning activities are planned by the teacher for all the children
        learner-directed curriculum a curriculum in which the learning activities emerge from individual interests and teacher guidance
        
        cognitively oriented curriculum a curriculum that attempts to blend the virtues of purposeful teaching with open-ended, child-initiated activities
        
        sensorimotor the first stage of Piaget's theory of cognitive development (ages 1½−2 years), in which the child uses senses and motor abilities to interact with the environment and understands only the here and now
        
        assimilation a Piagetian term for mental adaptation to one's environment by incorporating experiences
        
        accommodation a Piagetian term for mental adaptation to one's environment by reconciling differences of experiences
        
        equilibrium a Piagetian term for the state of balance between assimilation and accommodation, thereby allowing knowledge to be incorporated
        
        In a cognitively oriented program, the children's emerging abilities are “broadened and strengthened” rather than “taught.” In other words, once an ability is recognized by the teacher, it is nourished by the activities the teacher then provides. Children are not pushed to achieve at another developmental level. They also are not taught facts per se; they learn to think for themselves. Emphasis is placed on self-direction, rather than external reinforcement from others (as emphasized in behavioral programs).
        
        concrete operations the third stage in Piaget's theory of cognitive development (ages 7–11 years), in which the child can apply logical, systematic principles to specific experiences, but cannot distinguish between assumptions or hypotheses and facts or reality
        
        formal operations the fourth stage in Piaget's theory of cognitive development (ages 11 years and up), in which the child can think logically about abstract ideas and hypotheses as well as concrete facts
        
        preoperational the second stage in Piaget's theory of cognitive development (ages 2–7 years), in which children use symbols to represent objects, make judgments based on appearances, and believe that everyone shares their viewpoint
- - - - The disciplined mind—socialization toward mastering at least one way of thinking that is characteristic of a scholarly discipline, craft, or profession. The disciplined mind can focus on improving and mastering a skill.
      - The synthesizing mind—socialization toward integrating ideas from different disciplines into a coherent whole and the ability to communicate that integration.
      - The creating mind—socialization toward having the capacity to uncover and clarify new problems and questions, and pose possible and novel solutions.
      - The respectful mind—socialization toward awareness and appreciativeness of differences between human individuals and between human groups.
      - The ethical mind—socialization toward the ability to evaluate one's own work and the needs of society, conceptualizing how all citizens can work for the common good.
    - - The respectful mind is, fostered by “buddy reading”; children “read” to each other, using external mediator cards to remind them of their roles as they take turns reading and listening, thereby engaging in a cooperative partner activity.
        ♦ The ethical mind is fostered by “collection-making”; children work in a cooperative partnered math activity, taking turns counting and checking the items in their group's collection using a one-to-one correspondence.