March 26, 2007--Youth Week: Day Care
There is a blurb on the front page of today’s NY Times that says:
Poor Behavior is Linked to Time in Day Care:
A report from the largest, longest-running study of American childcare has found that keeping a pre-schooler in a day care center a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class—and that the effect persisted through sixth grade. The findings held up regardless of the child’s sex or family income, or the quality of the day care center.
The full story on page A14 has the same disturbing headline and details some of the findings from the study which was funded, beginning in 1991, with $200 million from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Every year in day care, the report states, leads to a one percent higher score on a “standardized assessment of problem behaviors completed by teachers.” So, the more time children spend in day care the worse their behavior is once they enter school.
To say the least, this is very upsetting news to parents who need to work or, if they can afford it, seek some respite from child rearing responsibilities by placing their young ones in a day care program. Not to mention how the pernicious effects of day care more than offset the cognitive and social-development benefits that had been thought to accrue, prior to this study, to children fortunate enough to be enrolled in a rich pre-school environment, since even the best and most expensive day care environments seem to turn children into bullies.
And the fact that these negative outcomes of day care appear to persist until at least the sixth grade makes matters even worse. The researchers are so disturbed by the results of their longitudinal study that they sought and received financing to follow the same students through high school and all the way into their twenties. It appears that they are expecting to find that the elementary school bullying they discovered will manifest itself in criminal behavior once these kids finish or, more likely, drop out of high school.
My shift of tone here should suggest that I am skeptical about these “scientific” findings. You would be correct to surmise this. Let me thus take a closer look at the context for the study, the researchers, and even the way the NY Times reported the conclusions.
Taking the latter first—below the scary headline, the Times article, in the second paragraph, says:
The [disruptive behavioral] effect was slight, and well within the normal range for healthy children. And, as expected, parents’ guidance and their genes held by far the strongest influence on how children behaved.
So why not the following alternative headline: “Study Finds Little Effect On the Behavior of Children Enrolled In Day Care”? Or, also in line with one of the study’s findings, “Day Care Study Finds Higher Vocabulary Scores for Children Placed In Day Care”?
And what about the context for the study? Begun in 1991, it came at a time when so-called conservative family advocates were decrying the fact that so many mothers were indulging themselves by working outside the home when they should have stayed at home, as God intended, to raise their children. Remember Rick Santorum? As a leader in the Senate he was a leading spokesperson for this point of view.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that when it came time to commission a study about the effects of day care, Bush 41 political appointees would turn to someone like Jay Belsky to be one of the study’s principal investigators. Belsky since the early 1990s had been one of the most outspoken opponents of day care. So much so that back in 2001, Salon wrote:
Colleagues of the controversial child-care expert say he hogs the limelight, has an agenda and makes alarmist claims that the evidence doesn't support,
And about the methodology of the study itself—it is by no means “scientific” since it does not use the random-assignment approach required by any rigorous assessment of a social intervention such as the impact of day care on child behavior. The method Belsky and Company employed is an “observational approach” where teachers who have post-day-care children in their classes are asked to fill out questionnaires about their perception about the behavior of these children. No credible social scientist for a minute would put up with much less publish the results from such subjective reporting.
One more thing—this study cost $200 million? I’d like someone to take a look at the books.
Poor Behavior is Linked to Time in Day Care:
A report from the largest, longest-running study of American childcare has found that keeping a pre-schooler in a day care center a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class—and that the effect persisted through sixth grade. The findings held up regardless of the child’s sex or family income, or the quality of the day care center.
The full story on page A14 has the same disturbing headline and details some of the findings from the study which was funded, beginning in 1991, with $200 million from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Every year in day care, the report states, leads to a one percent higher score on a “standardized assessment of problem behaviors completed by teachers.” So, the more time children spend in day care the worse their behavior is once they enter school.
To say the least, this is very upsetting news to parents who need to work or, if they can afford it, seek some respite from child rearing responsibilities by placing their young ones in a day care program. Not to mention how the pernicious effects of day care more than offset the cognitive and social-development benefits that had been thought to accrue, prior to this study, to children fortunate enough to be enrolled in a rich pre-school environment, since even the best and most expensive day care environments seem to turn children into bullies.
And the fact that these negative outcomes of day care appear to persist until at least the sixth grade makes matters even worse. The researchers are so disturbed by the results of their longitudinal study that they sought and received financing to follow the same students through high school and all the way into their twenties. It appears that they are expecting to find that the elementary school bullying they discovered will manifest itself in criminal behavior once these kids finish or, more likely, drop out of high school.
My shift of tone here should suggest that I am skeptical about these “scientific” findings. You would be correct to surmise this. Let me thus take a closer look at the context for the study, the researchers, and even the way the NY Times reported the conclusions.
Taking the latter first—below the scary headline, the Times article, in the second paragraph, says:
The [disruptive behavioral] effect was slight, and well within the normal range for healthy children. And, as expected, parents’ guidance and their genes held by far the strongest influence on how children behaved.
So why not the following alternative headline: “Study Finds Little Effect On the Behavior of Children Enrolled In Day Care”? Or, also in line with one of the study’s findings, “Day Care Study Finds Higher Vocabulary Scores for Children Placed In Day Care”?
And what about the context for the study? Begun in 1991, it came at a time when so-called conservative family advocates were decrying the fact that so many mothers were indulging themselves by working outside the home when they should have stayed at home, as God intended, to raise their children. Remember Rick Santorum? As a leader in the Senate he was a leading spokesperson for this point of view.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that when it came time to commission a study about the effects of day care, Bush 41 political appointees would turn to someone like Jay Belsky to be one of the study’s principal investigators. Belsky since the early 1990s had been one of the most outspoken opponents of day care. So much so that back in 2001, Salon wrote:
Colleagues of the controversial child-care expert say he hogs the limelight, has an agenda and makes alarmist claims that the evidence doesn't support,
And about the methodology of the study itself—it is by no means “scientific” since it does not use the random-assignment approach required by any rigorous assessment of a social intervention such as the impact of day care on child behavior. The method Belsky and Company employed is an “observational approach” where teachers who have post-day-care children in their classes are asked to fill out questionnaires about their perception about the behavior of these children. No credible social scientist for a minute would put up with much less publish the results from such subjective reporting.
One more thing—this study cost $200 million? I’d like someone to take a look at the books.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
10:51 AM
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