As in many other European countries early education and care has become wide spread in Switzerland. At second sight it is not only, but by the majority a phenomenon of big cities: demand and supply are larger and children growing up in urban environments are more likely to be cared for in day care centres (Stamm et al., 2009), which makes early education and care a subject for urban education.

Based on new findings in developmental psychology and neurosciences, early childhood is more and more seen as a crucial stage in human development. It is uncontested among the international scientific community that high quality child care is of great importance for the later success of children in school, considering the large corpus of present research from the US as well as several European countries (Sylva, Melhuish, Sammons, Siraj-Blatchford, & Taggart, 2004; Belsky, 2006; Burger, 2010). By contrast the state of knowledge is much lower in the German-speaking countries (Rossbach, 2005; Stamm et al., 2009).

The longitudinal study FRANZ under the direction of Prof. Dr. Margrit Stamm is exploring early education and care in German-speaking Switzerland. The main objective of the study with two waves is to examine effects of early education and care, family background, parenting and media exposure on cognitive and social development of three to five years old preschoolers. Child care effects on children with favourable and unfavourable familiar background will be explored as well as possible interactions between child, family, media variables and care settings with their positive or negative implications. It is an additional key task of the study to find out what constitutes an effective institutional child care setting. The research questions to be carried out in the present paper are the following:

1. In which early child care settings do the children grow up?
2. Are there differences concerning the cognitive and social development of preschoolers which can be lead back to different child care and socialization settings?

The ecological model of Bronfenbrenner is representing the theoretical background of the study (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998). Human development is conceptualized as a product of four components and their interactions: process, person, context and time. In our study we include these components by considering child variables, family background, early childhood education and care (inside and outside family) as well as influences of media exposure.

300 families with three to four year old children from German-speaking Switzerland constitute the sample. During each of the two waves early childhood development is examined using K-ABC (cognition; Melchers & Preuss, 2003), wortgewandt&zahlenstark (literacy, numeracy; Moser & Berweger, 2007) and VBV questionnaire for parents (behaviour; Döpfner, Berner, Fleischmann, & Schmidt, 2003). With face-to-face-interviews, questionnaires and observations we explore the socio-economic background, family characteristics, parenting, present development of the child, media exposure (Feierabend & Mohr, 2004) and quality of child care.

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