If you thought that the quality of the child care your toddler（学步的小孩） got wouldn't matter when he or she was a teenager, think again. A new longitudinal study（纵向研究） of more than 1,300 children has found that it does matter, more than a decade after the children have transitioned from child care to elementary school. The study, the first to document long-term effects of routine, nonrelative care in a large sample of children from economically diverse（不同的，变化多的） families, extends the findings of previous research on the topic.

The research represents the latest installment¹ of the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, which was carried out under the auspices² of（由……赞助或主办） the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The study appears in the May/June 2010 issue of the journal Child Development.

The researchers sought to determine if early child care quality, quantity, and type predict children's achievement and behavior problems at age 15. They looked at children born in 10 cities across the United States from the children's birth in 1991 until they turned 15, measuring quality, hours, and type of care during the early years; collecting results of standardized³ tests of achievement; and obtaining reports from teens, their families, and their schools. The children were from diverse backgrounds, including middle-class as well as low-income homes and two-parent as well as single-parent families.

The study found that the effects of early child care at age 15, while small, are comparable in size to those previously⁴ observed in early childhood and elementary school. Specifically, teens who attended programs with higher-quality care during early childhood scored higher on tests of cognitive⁵（认知的，认识的） and academic achievement than teens who attended programs with lower-quality care. Furthermore, teens who spent more hours in early child care during the first four-and-a-half years of their lives reported more risk-taking and greater impulsivity⁶（冲动性） than teens who spent fewer hours in care.

The researchers also found that teens who participated in higher-quality child care programs had fewer behavior problems—including rule-breaking, arguing, and hanging out with（与……出去玩） peers（平辈，同事） who get in trouble—than teens who had attended poor-quality child care.

"This evidence of long-term effects of early child care quality is noteworthy（显著的，值得注意的） because it occurred in a large economically and geographically⁷ diverse group of children who took part in routine nonrelative child care in their communities," notes Deborah Lowe Vandell, professor and chair of education at the University of California, Irvine, who is the lead author of the report.

"These findings suggest that the quality of early child care experiences can have long-lasting, albeit⁸（即使，虽然） small, effects on middle-class and affluent⁹ children, as well as those who are economically disadvantaged."