Author Description

The longitudinal "Competent Children" project is intended to discover what impact children's family resources and early childhood education experiences have on the development of children's cognitive, social, communicative, and problem-solving competencies. This report details findings of the first stage of the project. The report describes the competencies of 307 children in the Wellington region of New Zealand, in the context of their family background, home activities, the length of their early childhood education experience, and the quality of their current early childhood experience as they approach 5 years of age. More specifically, children's competencies are detailed in the context of: (1) constancy in their lives; (2) family resources; (3) their home activities; (4) patterns of early childhood education services (ECS); (5) the ECS resources, staff development, planning, assessment, and behavior rules; (6) children's experiences in early childhood services; and (7) ECS quality. The associations of children's competencies with home and ECES resources are also presented. The report examines the reasons why ECS resources seem to have different effects on different competencies, as well as why the considerable differences among family incomes were not associated with comparable differences in the quality of ECS attended by children from well-resourced and poorly resourced homes. One of the results noted in the report is that they approached 5 years of age, the majority of children were confident in their communication with others, could look after their own dressing and toileting, and solve problems in their exploration, games, and construction activities. Most were familiar with books and with numbers. Family income and mother's educational qualifications were most strongly associated with differences in levels of children's competencies. Girls tended to show more perseverance than boys, while boys tended to show more inquisitiveness than girls. Children's comp