Are longer hours in pre-school better for kids?

Study finds those who stayed in childcare beyond 40 hours had lower maths and literacy scores, but better behaviour

- Stephanie Yeo Senior

The longer your kid aged three to six spends in childcare beyond 40 hours a week, the greater the toll it takes on his or her academic performance, a 2024 study reveals.

Children in Singapore spend on average 41 hours a week in childcare, one of the highest durations in the world, according to a November 2024 policy brief from A*Star's Institute for Human Development and Potential (IHDP). The document, which is online at str.sg/Bjku, aims to educate the public and policymakers on new research findings and recommendations.

Over one in three children here (38 per cent) spend more than 50 hours weekly in such centres, a reflection of parents' long working hours.

In contrast, children in the United States spend an average of 25 to 33 hours a week in childcare, says Professor Jean Yeung, director of Social Sciences at A*Star's IHDP and a professor in the Department of Paediatrics and the Human Potential Translational Research Programme at the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.

Childcare centres in Singapore typically open on weekdays from 7am to 7pm and cater to children aged eighteen months to six years old. There were more than 152,000 children in childcare in 2023, according to figures from the Early Childhood Development Agency's (ECDA) website.

The latest childcare findings draw from the Singapore Longitudinal Early Development Study, a large-scale and nationally representative study of 5,000 children who were below age seven when it started in 2018.

For the study, scientists examined 2,330 children aged three to six who attended early childhood education programmes and their academic performance then. The findings were published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly in April 2024.

It found that for kids in childcare below 35 to 40 hours a week - or seven to eight hours a day across a five-day week - the more hours they attended childcare, the higher their maths and literacy scores.