Timing of Early Childcare Use and Child Development: A Quantile Regression

Abstract

This study examined the effect of the timing of usage of early childcare on children’s development using Panel Study of Korean Children from the 1st to 7th waves. Applying a quanitle regression, we compared the distribution of internalizing, externalizing problem, receptive vocabulary score, and school readiness between children who entered early childcare at their early age of 1-2 and children who entered early childcare at the age of 4. The study found that when the risk of problem behavior is higher in the distribution of risk behaviors among children, the earlier the childcare service is used, the higher the possibility of internalization and externalization problems. However, even in high-risk children, problem behaviors do not persist for a long time. Second, in terms of school readiness, children in the lower decile (20-30th percentile) who used childcare services early had higher communication scores than the group who used childcare facilities from 2012 onwards. Third, as a result of examining the effect of the time of childcare service use for children of low-educated parents, it was found that the early use of childcare service had no statistically significant effect on the school readiness. Based on this, we propose policy support for high-risk children such as program interventions tailored to the child's propensity and childcare services for the vulnerable, low-educated households.