Early childcare type predicts children’s emotional and behavioural trajectories into middle childhood. Data from the EDEN mother–child cohort study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background The scientific literature on the impact of early childcare on children’s behavioural and emotional difficulties shows contrasting results. We studied this association in France, where childcare is of high quality and children enter preschool at the age of 3. Methods 1428 children from the EDEN (Etude des Déterminants du développement et de la santé de l’ENfant) mother–child cohort set up in France (Nancy and Poitiers) were followed up since pregnancy to the age of 8 years. Group-based trajectory modelling was used to model their trajectories of behavioural and emotional symptoms (emotional symptoms, peer relationship problems, hyperactivity/inattention, conduct problems, prosocial behaviours) ascertained by three measures (3, 5.5 and 8 years) of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Using propensity scores and inverse probability weights (IPWs) to account for selection and confounding factors, we compared children in a childminder’s care or in centre-based childcare (from birth to age 3) with those in informal childcare. Results Compared with children in informal childcare, those who attended centre-based childcare had a lower likelihood of having high levels of emotional symptoms (OR IPW-adjusted =0.35, 95% CI 0.17 to 0.71), peer relationship problems (OR IPW-adjusted =0.31, 95% CI 0.15 to 0.67) and low prosocial behaviours (OR IPW-adjusted =0.50, 95% CI 0.28 to 0.90). Those who were looked after by a childminder had a higher likelihood of following a high trajectory of conduct problems (OR IPW-adjusted =1.72, 95% CI 1.05 to 2.81). Attendance of centre-based childcare for more than 1 year was especially protective of high levels of emotional, peer-related difficulties and low prosocial behaviours. Girls and children from a favourable socioeconomic background reaped more benefits of childcare than boys and those from a less favourable background. Conclusion High-quality centre-based childcare may be linked to lower levels of emotional symptoms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".