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Recent research suggests that quality of experience in child care centers and family child care homes in the United States is mediocre. The research literature over the past 20 years indicates how variations in quality of care in center-based and family child care affect children's development. Higher levels of quality across a wide range of child care settings are associated with enhanced social skills, reduced behavior problems, increased cooperation, and improved language in children. There appear to be no detrimental effects of infants ' attachment relations with their mothers as long as mothers provide adequate attention to infants at home. Longitudinal studies have found that some benefits in the social and cognitive domains persist into elementary school. The dimensions of quality most strongly related to child well-being include structural features of the child care setting such as lower child-staff ratios and smaller group sizes and caregiver-child dynamics, especially the caregiver's sensitivity an