Carefree in child care ? : child wellbeing, caregiving quality, and intervention programs in center-based child care

The use of center child care in Western countries has increased over the last three decades and is nowadays the most frequently used type of non-parental care for children aged zero to four (OECD, 2013). The aim of the current dissertation is to shed more light on indicators of child care quality in center child care and to answer the question whether narrow-focused caregiver interventions are effective in improving child care quality. The reported meta-analysis shows that narrow-focus intervention programs that target caregiver-child interaction and child social-emotional development through caregiver training are effective in improving child care quality. Moreover, we evaluated an attachment-based intervention program in a randomized controlled trial including 64 caregivers in Dutch child care centers. It is demonstrated that this program, the Video-feedback Intervention to promote Positive Parenting and Sensitive Discipline for Child Care (VIPP-CC), is effective in improving caregiver sensitivity and caregiver attitudes towards sensitive caregiving and discipline. Finally, we stress the importance of including novel indicators derived from environmental chaos theory in the assessment and improvement of child care quality and child wellbeing. Our results show that average noise levels and noise variability are important predictors of child emotional wellbeing in center care