This study describes the differences of parents’, teachers’, and the researcher’s assessment of quality of five different child care programs. This study focuses on infant and toddler classrooms or care settings. Parents, and teachers/providers completed the Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale and the Definition of Quality Questionnaire in order to rate the quality of infant and toddler child care programs. The findings from the questionnaires supported existing research that indicates a majority of child care programs in the United Stated range from poor to mediocre; and parents utilizing all types of cares, licensed/certified or otherwise, tended to overrate the quality of child care programs. In this study, the only exception to this tendency was the ratings of quality in the licensed and accredited center, where parents’, teachers’, and the researcher’s ratings were similar. This study provides a new contribution to the field of child care research in its finding that some of the teachers in all the different types of care settings investigated (with the exception of the licensed and accredited center) also tended to overrate the quality of infant and toddler child care programs.

Follow up interviews were conducted with some of the parents and teachers, in order to explore the reasons behind their ratings of quality. The consensus was that parents and teachers identified characteristics of quality that were dissimilar to those identified by child care experts. There are many possible reasons for this result, including lack of adequate information to help them identify determinant characteristics of quality programs, that there was difficulty in assessing quality, and that there was a lack of demand for quality programs.