Unlocking Potential: Investigating the Prolonged Impact of Formal Childcare Intensity on Non-Cognitive Skills

To support the expansion of universal early childcare programs, policymakers often refer to the positive outcomes documented in the literature. In reality, the evidence is mixed. In addition, most evidence is based on the impacts of enrolment in childcare for children aged 3-to-5-year-old. This research focuses on the intensity of childcare, measured in hours per week, for children under the age of 3. This area has received very little attention in the literature despite recent policy focus, specifically in the UK, on the number of hours of childcare which should be subsidised. We use data from a large, nationally representative English birth cohort, the Millennium Cohort Study, and an instrumental variables strategy that leverages exogenous variation in both the probability that the mother works shift work and has uncertain working hours to estimate whether hours in formal childcare prior to the age of 3 have an impact on non-cognitive skills at ages 3-14, which are measured by the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), proposed by Goodman (1997). Results indicate that increasing hours in formal childcare has an initial positive impact on non-cognitive skills which persists over time. Moreover, we estimate heterogeneous impacts across family background characteristics, suggesting that increasing access to more time in childcare for disadvantaged children may hold potential for decreasing early inequalities in child development. The results are robust to a number of sensitivity checks including weak instrument robust testing and discussion of potential omitted variables.