PARENTS AS CHILD-CARE CONSUMERS

The child care related values and quality assessments of parents as ch ild care consumers were examined. Seven hundred and twenty-seven paren ts of infants/toddlers toddlers and 2,407 parents of preschoolers resp onded to questionnaires, providing both importance and quality ratings for aspects of child care. Quality ratings for these same aspects of care were completed by trained data collectors. Parents gave high impo rtance scores for all aspects of care, with higher scores for interact ions, health and safety related items than for other aspects of care. Parents gave their children's quality of care significantly higher rat ings than did observers. When parents and observers rated the quality of aspects of care that were easy to monitor, differences in parent/ob server quality scores were smaller than when they rated aspects that w ere more difficult to monitor. As parental values increased for an asp ect of care, the difference between parent and observer quality scores also increased.