What We Know About Day Care

DAY CARE IS BAD FOR THE BRAIN Babies' neurons connect and stay connected when they are touched and held. If a baby is not held for hours a day, neural connections will not be made and the child will be less bright. "An extensive survey of child development suggests that children's educational achievement can be significantly held back if their mothers work. The findings, based on a survey of over 4,000 American children, are reported in a paper published by the non-partisan National Bureau of Economic Research. Christopher Ruhm, an economist at the University of North Carolina, says that 3 and 4 year-olds tend to have lower verbal ability if their mothers worked during the child's first year. Five and 6 year-olds tend to have worse reading and maths skills if their mothers worked during any of the child's first three years. Earlier studies, both in the US and elsewhere, have found that working mothers had little effect on child development. But Mr Ruhm says these have generally used smaller samples and controlled for fewer factors such as the parent's education and family size. The type of childcare used by working parents does not appear to have a significant effect on development. A 1974 study in the journal Developmental Psychology reported that children who entered day care before their first birthday were "significantly more aggressive" and more physically and verbally abusive of adults than other children. Several more recent studies are quoted in the January 8, 1998 Wall Street Journal which show that children "...who had spent more time in day care suffered proportionately greater ill effects, regardless of the quality of the care."

Of special interest to moms considering day care: studies have found the more time your child is in day care, especially if day care begins before your child is 12 months old, the less sensitive you, the mom, become to your child's needs. This apparently is how vast numbers of moms can make the ridiculous claim that their baby likes day care. Jasto's circle of at-home moms has long noted with curiosity that working moms children appear to need them less. At-home moms' kids are more insistent that mom be nearby - the day care raised children seem not to care - or perhaps have learned it doesn't help if they express their desire for mom.

In 1985, a study published in Child Development found that the more time a child spent in day care, the more likely teachers were to rate the child as "having aggressiveness as a serious deficit of social behavior." Jay Belsky of Penn State declares full-time day care babies are at risk of "heightened aggressiveness, non-compliance and withdrawal in the preschool and early school years." In 1997, the NICHD study which purported to show day care was good for kids in fact found that the fact of a child being placed in day care was a good predictor of poor mother-child interaction. Yale University child development specialist Edward Zigler calls day care "psychological thalidomide!"

There are links at home to other sites with dire facts about day care. Or try this site from Nurturing magazine that summarizes the bad news about day care and challenges the interchangeable caregiver model.

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