Day Care News: Parents, You Count Most
Child care is a constant source of concern for parents of young children. They worry not only about finding decent care, but about whether putting children in child care early in life harms their social and academic development later on. Studies that have tried to answer that question haven't been very helpful, because they have not taken account of quality of care, the amount of time children were in child care, and the type of care. With 10 million children under age 5 in child care for 40 or more hours a week, it's no small matter.
In the early 1990s, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development tried to overcome research shortcomings by launching a long-term study, following more than 1,300 children from birth. New data from the study, published in the March/April Child Development, takes the children through sixth grade and offers both good and bad news. The children who were in high-quality child care did better on vocabulary tests. (High-quality child-care situations generally have fewer children per adult, and the teachers have undergraduate degrees, preferably in early childhood education.) On the other hand, children who were in center-based child care exhibited more problem behaviors in school than those cared for at home, according to their teachers.
The behavior differences were slight, says James Griffin, a clinical psychologist who is science officer for the study at NICHD. If you went into a sixth-grade classroom, he says, you wouldn't be able to easily spot the kids who'd been in center-based child care. This observational study can't be interpreted to mean that child-care centers cause more bad behavior, Griffin says. He speculates that the difference could be because children in a group setting have to compete more for an adult's attention. "Parents early on should take reports of problem behaviors seriously," Griffin says, and work with the child and the pediatrician to come up with better ways of handling conflict with peers and getting attention.
With or without day care, the best indicator of how well a child will function academically and socially in sixth grade is the quality of the parents' child rearing skills. Parents who are responsive to children, can help calm them when upset, and who talk with them rather than just give orders, for example, can expect to get the best results.
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