Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Children with better behavioral self-regulation (SR) go on to have better health, on average. Preschool-based interventions have successfully promoted SR; however, ecological studies have reported that children exposed to Quebec’s universal childcare program had more externalizing behaviors in middle childhood. We studied the association between preschool childcare (age 2 to 5 years) and poor SR (PSR) in kindergarten (age 6 years), and whether PSR-childcare associations persisted through to grade 6 (age 12 years) and differed in children from less advantaged families. Study participants were children enrolled in the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development, a representative birth cohort of children born in 1997-98. PSR z-score was the standardized sum of 14 Likert scale items on inattention, hyperactivity and reactive aggression behaviors, completed by the child’s teacher in kindergarten, grades 1, 2, 4, and 6. We estimated PSR’s relation to four counterfactual childcare profiles—center-based, regulated home-based, or unregulated home-based for 35 hrs/wk, or parental care—using hierarchical linear regression, controlling for childcare timing and intensity, and potential confounders. The analysis included 5,280 PSR z-scores in 1,413 children. Accounting for detailed individual-level exposure to childcare, we also found that center- and home-based regulated childcare were weakly associated with worse SR. Among less advantaged children, SR was worse only following center-based care.