The realities of day care - National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Study of Early Child Care

Public Interest, Fall, 1996 by Gwen J. Broude

The most far-reaching and comprehensive study to date has found that using child care does not affect infants' trust in their mothers." Thus began a front-page story in the April 21 edition of the New York Times, summarizing preliminary findings of an ambitious government-supported research project, the NICHD Study of Early Child Care.(1) The results had been reported by a panel of investigators at the International Conference on Infant Studies held in Providence, Rhode Island. When the panel announced its conclusions, members of the audience gasped.

The surprise, in part, reflected the dramatic turnabout in predictions about the effects of day care which the report seemed to represent. Over the past decade, mounting evidence appearing in academic journals had begun to convince psychologists that youngsters, and especially infants, placed in day care are more likely to display an "insecure attachment" to their mothers, meaning that the baby is either unusually sensitive or indifferent to absences of the mother. So the idea that day care does not, after all, compromise the mother-infant relationship was, to say the least, unexpected.

But the audience must have also been surprised to hear the news from this particular set of messengers, some of whom had actually sounded the original alarm about the destructive effects of day care. For example, in a 1988 study on day care, Jay Belsky, a collaborator in the Early Child Care Study, said that his research "clearly reveal[ed] that extensive nonmaternal (and nonparental) care in the first year is a risk factor in the development of insecure infant-parent attachment relationships."

Can parents now feel more relaxed about providing alternative care for their youngsters while they are at work? What's the truth about day care? And how do these developments affect the public-policy debate about how to provide care for American children?

Early warnings about day care

The Early Child Care Study is the latest entry in a debate about day care which started in the 1970s when an increasing number of women began to enter the work force and to deposit their youngsters in day-care facilities. In 1975, 6,000,000 working women were mothers of preschool children. By 1995, the figure had jumped to 14,600,000. In lockstep with the increase in the number of working mothers were the ballooning day-care statistics. In 1977, 4,370,000 children under five years old were being cared for on a regular basis by someone other than the mother. By 1991, 9,854,000 youngsters were in day care.

At the same time, however, women worried about the effects that day care might have on their children, and especially on the quality of their relationships to their babies. Put starkly, mothers feared that they would end up taking second place in their children's affections, displaced by whoever was caring for their youngsters while they were at work. The worry spilled over into academic developmental research.

Early studies on the effects of day care on mother-child relationships reported no differences in the quality of attachment of day-care and home-raised children. But this research focused on high-quality, university-sponsored day-care centers. In the late 1970s, psychologists began to observe the attachment of children who had been placed in more typical day-care facilities. Suddenly, the effects of day care no longer seemed so benign. Studies began to warn of an increased likelihood of insecure attachment in day-care children, and especially in youngsters who had been placed in day care before their first birthday. Delays in cognitive performance, as well as undesirable social behavior, were also showing up in some children who attended ordinary day-care facilities. Some psychologists started to wonder whether children ought to be placed in day care at all.

These depressing reports from academia turned day care into an ideological issue. People who viewed the news about day care as a threat to working women attacked the findings and the messengers. The result: The suspected negative effects of day care were at times downplayed, even by the researchers reporting them. Some people began to lobby for governmental regulations guaranteeing that all day care would be more like the kind of care provided by university-sponsored centers, hoping in this way to make day care a safe option for working women. Others saw the dismal findings about day care as an opportunity to create a new government program, thus making quality care an entitlement. But if, as the Times story implies, the Early Child Care Study vindicates day care, a mother would now, after all, be able to place her baby in day care without compromising her relationship to her child. However, what, in fact, does the Early Child Care Study say?

Mother and child

When people talk about day care, they usually have in mind a formal day-care center, a place in which one or more caretakers look after a group of infants and children in a facility reserved for the purpose. In fact, only around 25 percent of day-care children attend centers of this sort. Around 30 percent of children are sent to home-based day care, where a small number are cared for in a caretaker's home. About one-third of day-care children are cared for in their own homes by the father, a relative, or a baby-sitter. The remaining children of working parents are supervised by a parent at the workplace or receive no supervision.