ISSN: 2222-6990
Open access
There is no denying that the number of childcare centres, commonly known as nurseries, is mushrooming rapidly. This is due to the high parental demand for the competency of personnel in Early childhood education and care (ECEC), especially for working parents. This study aims to determine the parents’ expectations of the competency personnel in providing ECEC for their children ages 0 to 3. A descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out at the childcare center in Chengdu, China which involved 450 respondents using a convenient sampling method. The inclusion criteria were fathers or mothers with children aged 0-3 years old and already enrolled in the childcare center in Chengdu. The results show parents gave high importance scores for all aspects of the competency domains and higher scores for health and safety related items than other aspects. For the competency domains such as respondents aged 30-40, with mean scores of 4.78 and SD=0.36; possess college and secondary education, with mean scores of 4.67 and SD=0.43; children aged 25 months until 36 months with mean scores of 4.60 and SD=0.50 giving the highest scores for competency domains. A one-way ANOVA test found that there were relationships between sociodemographic data and the expectations of the competency were statistically significant among parents of varying ages and educational backgrounds where p-value < 0.05. The parental group aged 30-40, possessing college and secondary education, exhibited the most significant demand for abilities across all dimensions, and there was no significance in occupation, family income, or primary care of the child. The findings can provide recommendations for the government to improve the construction of the childcare service system and provide a reference for the construction of courses for cultivating childcare professionals in colleges and universities.
Bjornestad, E., & Os, E. (2018). Quality in Norwegian childcare for toddlers using ITERS-R. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 26(1), 111-127.
Burchinal, M. (2018). Measuring early care and education quality. Child Development Perspectives, 12(1), 3-9.
Chen, H., Wang, X., Li, Z., Chen, W., & Cai, Y. (2019). Distributed sensing and cooperative estimation/detection of ubiquitous power internet of things. Protection and Control of Modern Power Systems, 4(2), 1-8.
Ellingsæter, A. L., & Gulbrandsen, L. (2007). Closing the childcare gap: The interaction of childcare provision and mothers' agency in Norway. Journal of social policy, 36(4), 649-669.
Fukkink, R. G., & Lont, A. (2007). Does training matter? A meta-analysis and review of caregiver training studies. Early childhood research quarterly, 22(3), 294-311.
Fukkink, R. G., & Lont, A. (2007). Does training matter? A meta-analysis and review of caregiver training studies. Early childhood research quarterly, 22(3), 294-311.
Geoffroy, M. C., Côté, S. M., Giguère, C. É., Dionne, G., Zelazo, P. D., Tremblay, R. E., ... & Séguin, J. R. (2010). Closing the gap in academic readiness and achievement: the role of early childcare. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 51(12), 1359-1367.
Hahn, J. Y., Song, Y. B., Oh, J. H., Cho, D. K., Lee, J. B., Doh, J. H., ... & Ahn, K. J. (2018). 6-month versus 12-month or longer dual antiplatelet therapy after percutaneous coronary intervention in patients with acute coronary syndrome (SMART-DATE): a randomised, open-label, non-inferiority trial. The Lancet, 391(10127), 1274-1284.
Hamre, B., Hatfield, B., Pianta, R., & Jamil, F. (2014). Evidence for general and domain?specific elements of teacher–child interactions: Associations with preschool children's development. Child development, 85(3), 1257-1274.
He, W., Goodkind, D., & Kowal, P. R. (2016). An aging world: 2015.
Hong, X., Jiang, Y., Luo, L., & Li, P. H. (2022). The impact of two-child policy on early education and development in China. Early Education and Development, 33(3), 369-374.
ISSOP Migration Working Group. (2018). ISSOP position statement on migrant child health. Child: Care, Health and Development, 44(1), 161-170.
Jennings, P. A., & Greenberg, M. T. (2009). The prosocial classroom: Teacher social and emotional competence in relation to student and classroom outcomes. Review of educational research, 79(1), 491-525.
Kaga, Y., Bennett, J., & Moss, P. (2010). Caring and learning together: A cross-national study on the integration of early childhood care and education within education. Unesco.
Kagan, S. L., & Hallmark, L. G. (2001). Cultivating Leadership in Early Care and Education--Reaping the Harvest of a New Approach to Leadership. Childcare information exchange.
Katsiada, E., Roufidou, I., Wainwright, J., & Angeli, V. (2018). Young children’s agency: Exploring children’s interactions with practitioners and ancillary staff members in Greek early childhood education and care settings. Early child development and care, 188(7), 937-950.
Manning, M., Wong, G. T., Fleming, C. M., & Garvis, S. (2019). Is a teacher qualification associated with the quality of the early childhood education and care environment? A meta-analytic review. Review of educational research, 89(3), 370-415.
Melhuish, E. (2016). Longitudinal research and early years policy development in the UK. International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy, 10(1), 1-18.
NICHD Early Child Care Research Network. (2002). Early childcare and children’s development prior to school entry: Results from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care. American educational research journal, 39(1), 133-164.
Oura, P. (2021). Sociodemographic indicators of birth rate in a low fertility country–A nationwide study of 310 Finnish municipalities covering> 5,000,000 inhabitants. Frontiers in public health, 9, 643561.
Pronzato, C. (2017). Fertility decisions and alternative types of childcares. IZA World of Labor.
Sleebos, J. (2003). Low fertility rates in OECD countries: facts and policy responses.
Thévenon, O., & Gauthier, A. H. (2011). Family policies in developed countries: A ‘fertility-booster’with side-effects. Community, Work & Family, 14(2), 197-216.
Urban, M., Vandenbroeck, M., Van Laere, K., Lazzari, A., & Peeters, J. (2012). Towards competent systems in early childhood education and care. Implications for policy and practice. European Journal of Education, 47(4), 508-526.
Vincent, C. (2017). ‘The children have only got one education and you have to make sure it's a good one’: parenting and parent–school relations in a neoliberal age. Gender and Education, 29(5), 541-557.
Yang, Z., Yang, D., Dyer, C., He, X., Smola, A., & Hovy, E. (2016). Hierarchical attention networks for document classification. In Proceedings of the 2016 conference of the North American chapter of the association for computational linguistics: human language technologies (pp. 1480-1489).
(Yang & Latif, 2024)
Yang, H., & Latif, R. A. (2024). Parents Expectation on the Competency of Personnel in Providing Early Childhood Education and Care: A Cross-Sectional Survey in Chengdu City, China. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 14(7), 1229–1245.
Copyright: © 2024 The Author(s)
Published by HRMARS (www.hrmars.com)
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seen at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode