Abstract

The circumstances in which children are born and their material and intellectual resources determine their abilities and the extent to which they will be able to develop their human potential. Government policies cannot address all the issues that lead to development gaps, but they can provide resources to disadvantaged families to help create nurturing environments for children. This paper proposes a childcare measure that facilitates the analysis of household environmental quality. The indicator synthesizes the level of compliance with good parenting practices associated with the development of essential cognitive and socio-emotional abilities. The purpose is to identify the different degrees of childcare, to assess child living conditions and to contribute to a more efficient use of public funds. We use a linguistic-mathematical model based on the fuzzy sets theory to define a multidimensional linguistic index of childcare. The index encompasses different measures associated with child upbringing with an emphasis on nutritional and health conditions. Remarkably, most of the children in the sample are exposed to mean or high-quality childcare. However, the number of children that evidence very high-quality childcare is low.

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