The Kids Are Alright
What the latest day-care study really found.
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Wednesday, March 28, 2007, at 5:21 PM ET
"Parenting quality significantly predicted all the developmental outcomes and much more strongly than did any of the child-care predictors,"
"Teachers reported more problem behaviors for children who spent more time in centers." This effect also held steady over time. And as the New York Times put it, "the finding held up regardless of the child's sex or family income, and regardless of the quality of the day care center." As in, Beware of Day Care. No matter how good you think your kid's is, it's making him unruly and disruptive, two favorite media adjectives for kids who cause trouble at school.
Stop. When I reached the study's author, Margaret Burchinal, yesterday, she asked if she could explain something she feared had been missed. "I'm not sure we communicated this, but the kids who had one to two years of daycare by age 4½—which was typical for our sample—had exactly the level of problem behavior you'd expect for kids of their age. Most people use center care for one or two years, and for those kids we're not seeing anything problematic."
the higher-than-average incidence of bad behavior showed up only among kids who spent three or four years in day care before the age of 4½.
the kids with more reported behavior problems in elementary school were the ones who spent three or four years in day care and whose care was, on average, of lower quality.
Day care for infants and toddlers is the hardest to do well. And lower-quality care, coupled with three or four years spent at a center, doesn't appear to serve kids quite as well as other arrangements (though the difference in slight).
