Childcare McCarthyism
Some childcare findings are simply more equal than others.

By Jay Belsky, director of the Institute for the Study of Children, Families, and Social Issues, Birkbeck College, University of London, and collaborating investigator on the NICHD Study of Early Child Care.
May 9, 2001 9:00 a.m.

fter 10 years of work, results from the largest and most comprehensive study of early childcare and child development ever conducted indicate that early childcare carries both developmental benefits and risks. The benefits derive from the fact that children who experience high-quality care appear advantaged when it comes to their cognitive and language development at ages 15, 24, 36, and 54 months. There is also some evidence that better quality care promotes social competence, at least when children are 2 and 3 years of age, but this seems less so by the time they reach 4 ½ years. Quality care is defined in terms of the extent to which caregivers are attentive, responsive, stimulating, sensitive, and affectionate with the children for whom they provide non-maternal care. And such high quality care is more likely when caregivers are reasonably well trained and do not have too many children to care for.

In terms of developmental risks, the NICHD Study of Early Child Care finds that more time spent in any non-maternal childcare arrangements is related — irrespective of its quality and family-background factors — to higher levels of aggression and disobedience, not just assertiveness and independence, when children are 2 and 4 1/2 years of age and in kindergarten. More time in care is also related to less sensitive mothering and, thus, less harmonious mother-child interaction patterns when children are 6, 15, 24, and 36 months of age. Finally, when mothers evince limited sensitivity in their interactions with their children, more time spent in non-maternal care also predicts a greater likelihood of insecure attachments when children are 15 and 36 months old.

It would be irresponsible not to point out that in no case can the findings just summarized be described as strong in magnitude. They are rather modest. But the fact that more and more children are spending more and more time at younger and younger ages in non-maternal care in the U.S. makes even modest effects meaningful. After all, a small impact on many may be of far greater societal significance than a large impact that affects few. Just think in terms of the third-grade teacher supervising 10-15 rather than 3-4 children — all with histories of poor quality child care and/or full-time care that began by 6 months of age and continued until school entry. Is this teacher spending more time managing than teaching her class? And, if so, what are the consequences for the academic achievement of all the students in the class?

Despite the fact that both good news and bad news about childcare emerges from the NICHD study, there has been a reaction, even among study investigators, to "shoot the messenger." What is most troubling about this is the double standard that it reveals with respect to how child-care research is reported and interpreted within all too much of academia and in the press. A series of questions nicely illustrates this double standard:

Why is it so objectionable if we make working mothers feel guilty upon reporting findings linking lots of time in childcare with more aggression and disobedience, but it is not equally objectionable when we make stay-at-home mothers feel guilty by reporting, as the NICHD study did two years ago, that children who experienced high-quality childcare outscore children raised at home with their mothers on tests of cognitive functioning?

Why must findings linking quantity of childcare and aggression be qualified ad nauseum, even to the point of arguing that we are supposedly speaking about aggression "in the normal range" when such qualifications are not demanded of the good news? Why have the NICHD study investigators never made it clear that the large majority of children experiencing poor-quality care function "in the normal range"? Why, in fact, when the study found, as it did two years ago, that low-quality care was related to more problem behavior when children were 2 and 3 years of age, was there no talk about aggression "in the normal range"? And why is it when higher levels of aggression and disobedience are found to be related to experiences like growing up in poverty or being reared by a depressed mother, that no one ever talks about aggression "in the normal range" as they so cavalierly do now when the issue is the depth of childcare experience?

Why is it fundamentally mistaken to infer causation from correlational evidence by raising the prospect that children might benefit from spending less time in childcare, but it is perfectly okay to do so when arguing on behalf of policies that promote higher-quality child care?

The only answers I can find for these questions — which I have repeatedly posed to my collaborating investigators in questioning the "uneven playing field" we operate on when analysing study data — is that childcare research and childcare advocacy exist in a world reminiscent of Orwell's Animal Farm: Not only are some childcare findings simply more equal than others, but some citizen constituencies are more worthy of consideration than others.

Just because hundreds of thousands of families rely upon childcare does not mean that disconcerting news should be censored and downplayed in ways that more pleasing news never is. And just because one reports disconcerting news about childcare does not mean one is against childcare. By the latter logic, (which is so widespread as to make one wonder whether there has been an outbreak of brain disease), one would have to regard the weatherman as being against sunshine when he says it is going to rain or an economist against growth when he says we are in the midst of recession.

Ultimately, all the findings about the effects of childcare emanating from the NICHD study should be placed in the following context for sake of interpretation: Much of childcare in America is mediocre, if not poor in quality, usually due to limited funding. And, as Public Agenda reported last year, the overwhelming majority of parents with a child under five would like to rely less on childcare and provide more care for their young children themselves.

These contextual conditions lead me to draw two major policy implications from the evidence emerging to date from the NICHD study. First, efforts should be made to enable parents to rely less on childcare so they can care for their infants and toddlers themselves when that is their desire. Second, the quality of childcare available to families should be improved. Although I could argue the merits of each recommendation on an empirical basis, it might make more sense to do so on humanitarian grounds alone. Why so many insist on only talking about the good news and thus the need for improvements in quality childcare — but insist on shouting down anyone ready to speak about the bad news — continues to mystify me.