Better day care boosts skills.

• Position: Children

Youngsters who spent their first four and a half years in higher-quality child care arrangements scored better on tests of cognitive skills and language ability than did those in lower-quality care, according to findings from the largest long-term study of child care in the U.S. Aletha C. Huston, Priscilla Pond Flawn Regents Professor of Child Development, The University of Texas at Austin, one of the principal investigators in the study, commenting on how parents could determine the level of quality in a particular day care setting, indicates that "You need to look at the kind of human interactions that are going on, more than the pretty toys and fancy physical setting." She says parents should try to observe "the way care givers interact, whether they talk to the children, what kinds of activities the children are engaged in. If the children spend a lot of time wandering around doing nothing, that is a bad sign. If they don't want you to observe, then you should have concerns about the place."

Huston believes researchers found more-advanced cognitive skills and language ability in youngsters in higher-quality centers "because adults in high-quality settings provide more language stimulation. They talk to, and listen to, children. And...