Universal childcare: is it good for children?

Whether the policy is likely to impact these children depends again on the individual circumstances; more specifically, why is the mother not working and why is the child not in some form of care? The situation of the child whose mother has either the financial means – or has made the financial sacrifices – to remain at home with her child through choice is vastly different to that of the child wh. [...] A second line of questions relates to how the term ‘benefit’ is defined, how it is measured and how do these relate to both the needs of children and the values and prioritise of parents? As we have seen, the explicit intention of the Conservative Party’s childcare proposal is not just to reduce the childcare costs of mothers who are already working, but to encourage mothers with young children to. [...] Analyses of the impact of childcare on children have to take into account a huge number of variables, including the age of the children, the socio-economic status of the children, the quality of the children’s family relationships, how stimulating is the home environment, the type of childcare setting (that is, is it individual, small or large group) and the quality of the childcare setting. [...] Given that the social-cultural trend is towards the normalisation of non-maternal childcare for more and more hours at younger and younger ages, it would seem to be of vital importance to examine the characteristics of these families and compare outcomes for their children – across a broad range of measures – to the outcomes of children cared for mainly in formal settings. [...] A search of the literature produced 29 studies which focus on or include information about the impact of nursery care on the academic/cognitive and socio-emotional development of children under three, four of which also feature on the list of papers on the effects of universal childcare.