Many Good Parents Choose Daycare

September 07, 2008

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Many Good Parents Choose Daycare

by Robert Needlman, M.D., F.A.A.P.
reviewed by Laura Jana, M.D., F.A.A.P.

The recent report hit working parents everywhere like a slap in the face: A 10-year-long study financed by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) determined that long hours spent at daycare centers result in "overly aggressive" children who present a host of behavioral problems for their kindergarten teachers.

The resulting publicity has put the potential risks of child care back on the national radar screen. If that makes parents, communities, and the government take a long, hard look at the quality of care that their children are receiving, that's great! Poor-quality child care is a national scandal, or it should be.

But if new research convinces good parents that they are harming their children by putting them in daycare and that the only responsible way to raise a child is for a parent (let's not kid ourselves, a motherin most cases) to stay at home, then it's not doing anyone a service.

Look beyond the headlines
The gist of the research is that 17 percent of kindergarteners who had spent more than 30 hours per week in paid child care were reported as being "overly aggressive" toward other children, while only 6 percent of those who were in paid care for less than 10 hours per week were rated as aggressive.

On the surface, this finding would seem to support the headline that "Daycare Makes Children Aggressive." But there are several reasons to question this conclusion:

We don't have the actual published report to look at and critique. The research findings came from a large, federally funded project, and they were presented April 19 at a national meeting of the well-respected Society for Research in Child Development in Minneapolis. But until the details are published-and that could be weeks or months from now--it's impossible to make an independent judgment about possible flaws in the research that could undercut its validity.

Even accepting that the study was well done, the claim that child care causes aggression is a stretch. It's rare that a single study proves that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between one thing and another. The best way to do this is through a true experiment, by which I mean a study in which the research exposes one group of randomly chosen children to the proposed cause, while not exposing another randomly chosen group.

Of course, that didn't happen in this study. Rather, the children who spent more time in paid care did so because their parents felt that it was necessary or desirable; the children who spent less time in daycare had parents who felt differently. In other words, there were differences in parental attitudes and family situations before the children ever got to child care. How can we be certain that these differences did not account for the reported aggressiveness? I'm not trying to say that I know what the differences were, or how they might have affected the children's behavior, but only that the NICHD study leaves some important questions unanswered.

The findings are inconsistent with much previous research that has shown that the important factor is not whether or not a child attends child care, but rather the quality of the care that he receives. The differences between high- and poor-quality care can be dramatic. In one, children are attended by well-trained, sensitive, caring adults who know how to win their trust; support their emotional, social, and cognitive development; and work together with the parents as a team. In the other, children may be all but neglected, if not actively abused. Knowledge of child development, as well as common sense, would lead one to expect rather large differences in aggression, anxiety, and other behavioral and emotional outcomes between these two extremes of child-care quality, and other studies have indeed found this. Yet the recent, highly publicized study apparently found only a small or modest effect related to quality. One has to wonder why.

I do not mean to discount the study altogether. It was large, well funded, and carried out by respected researchers. But I do think that it's a mistake to merely accept the one-line conclusion that child care causes aggressiveness. The truth is sure to be more complex than that.

What you can do
If you're a parent with children in daycare, the news linking longer child-care hours with behavior problems should move you to act, but not necessarily to quit your job and stay home. Instead, take another look at your arrangement: Is your child happy and comfortable in her daycare situation? Does she have caring, sensitive adults to interact with, and (especially for young children) is there one adult with whom she has developed a special, trusting bond?

Is your child showing signs of aggressive or anxious behavior? If so, think broadly about all the possible causes and what you might be able to do to help her feel more comfortable. Simply stopping the child care may not be the best solution (it may not even be possible). On the other hand if your child seems to be having trouble adjusting to long days away from you and you've been feeling that you're missing out on too much of her early life, you may want to consider working fewer hours and having more time at home. (I mean this advice to apply equally whether you are the father or the mother.) In other words, the decision about use of paid child care has to be a personal one, not one dictated by a single research study. Children and families thrive when parents have a full range of options, from high-quality care to staying at home, and choose what they judge to be best for their family overall.

Talk about:

Newborn and Infant Child Care

Toddler and Preschool Daycare

Child Care for School-Age Children


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Created April 25, 2001
Reviewed April 26, 2001

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