2011 The Palm Beach County Family Study (Full Report)

Service Use, Maternal Functioning, and Child DevelopmentSimilar to analyses conducted in year 4, we found little evidence of a relationship between the mothers’overall service use and maternal and child outcomes, or between specific types of services (e.g., parenteducation) and child outcomes. Instead, the evidence suggests that mothers with greater needs tend to usemore services over time. This implies that those who may have greater need for services are using thembut that, once observable differences in circumstances between mothers with high and low needs areaccounted for, greater use of services overall—at least as measured by this study—is not associated withimproved outcomes.However, consistent with the literature on child development, there is evidence of the important role ofparenting practices in children’s development. That is, mothers’ parenting scores in year 1 weresignificantly and positively related to several of the child outcomes we examined. These results suggestthat effective interventions targeted at improving parenting skills around the time of a child’s birth mightpositively influence his or her development.A third finding concerns the potential positive impact of center-based care and other formal childcarearrangements—as opposed to parental and other informal care—in the year prior to kindergarten entry onmothers’ reports of child development. When we looked at possible differences between children enrolledin programs that were part of Quality Counts (QC) and other formal arrangements, we found evidence ofbetter outcomes, as reported by mothers, in some areas of preliteracy development among children in thenon-QC centers. However, we do not know enough about the characteristics of these childcarearrangements or about the attendance and participation of the study children in these childcare settings tointerpret these results. These findings should be explored further. 74Also consistent with the year 4 results, we found that the children of foreign-born Hispanic mothers maybe lagging in their development, when compared to the children of black mothers, both foreign- and U.S.-born. Although it is not clear whether these data, which come from mothers’ self-reports, reflect realdifferences or differences in interpretations of survey questions and children’s development, these resultssuggest that interventions tailored specifically to the needs of these mothers and their children may bewarranted.Controlling for maternal education, employment, poverty status, year 1 parenting score, and childcarearrangements, Hispanic foreign-born mothers were less likely than mothers of other race/ethnic/immigrant groups to report their children to be in the top 25 percent on measures of pre-academic74 A recently completed study of the school readiness rates of children attending programs in the Quality Counts system suggestspositive effects of the QC (Shen, Tackett, Ma 2009).Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago 139