Minding the Children: A Hard Look at Day-Care

Should mothers shun employment and stay home to raise their children?

The question, for many American parents, is immaterial: A growing number have no choice but to seek paying jobs outside the home. Economic necessity and the increase in single-parent families have made “normal” households--father as breadwinner, mother as child-minder and housekeeper--a receding American image. It is an image, nonetheless, still maintained and defended in some traditional circles.

There have been times when the idyll was disrupted. During World War II, the government set up day-care centers so women could work in defense plants. At war’s end, however, the centers were shuttered as rapidly as possible, almost in guilty admission that the nation needed to put mothers back in the home with their children.

Two decades passed before the federal government’s War on Poverty focused national attention again on early-childhood care and education, through the introduction of Head Start as a national child- and family-service program for the poor.

Today, two forces have converged to make early-childhood care and education a national priority. Both stem from major changes in society:

--The gradual shift of women from the home and farm into the paid work force, initially into low-wage and often part-time, unskilled jobs and, more recently, into higher paying full-time positions.

--The intensifying national search for effective ways to improve the lives of disadvantaged youth.

Women in the work place are nothing new, of course, but census numbers tell the story: In 1890, only 15% of women age 25 to 44 worked outside the home; by 1985, that rate of participation had risen to 71%. Never-married single women 25-44 have been a constant major factor in the paid work force over the last few decades, with about 80% participating in both 1950 and in 1985. The change has been in the entrance of married women: Working women have increased from 26% of the married female population, ages 25-44, in 1950 to approximately 67% in 1985 (41% full-time, 26% part-time). Further, in 1986, 49% of married women with children under 1 year old, had paying jobs.

Extensive participation by mothers in the work force has created an overwhelming need for high quality day-care. The issue no longer is whether women should work outside the home; both single and married women with children work. The issue now is how to provide reliable and appropriate care for their children. The availability of such care is increasingly affected because, as more women find jobs, fewer are left in the neighborhoods to provide informal, family-based services or other types of day-care. Further, 32% of the mothers who do not work outside of the home enroll their children in some form of day care and/or preschool program as well, thereby swelling the demand.

In short, we are a nation in which the majority of women are in paid employment and in which their children are being cared for and educated outside the home. Is this harmful to children?

In the early 1960s, when the first studies were conducted on the effects of preschool, there were fears that such experiences outside the home would be detrimental both to the development of children and their family relationships. These fears have been allayed in the last few years as several of these studies, forerunners of the national Head Start project, have reported clear indications that high-quality early-childhood education for disadvantaged children is a highly effective means of improving their lives.

High/Scope Foundation’s Ypsilanti Perry Preschool study tracked children who attended the program as 3- and 4-year-olds in 1962-1965 and found that, at age 19, they were better off than comparable young adults who did not have the preschool experience. The Perry program increased the percentage of participants who were functionally literate (from 38% to 61%); enrolled in post-secondary education (from 21% to 38%) and employed (from 32% to 50%). In addition, the program reduced the percentage of participants who were classified as mentally retarded during school years (from 35% to 15%); school dropouts (from 51% to 33%); arrested (from 51% to 31%); teen-age mothers (from 67% to 48%) and on welfare (from 32% to 18%).

While these findings strongly support the value of high quality early-education for disadvantaged children, an equally strong endorsement comes from the business community. An economic analysis of the Perry Preschool study found that not providing a one-year early-education program of high quality for disadvantaged children eventually costs taxpayers six times as much--in education, welfare and judicial costs--as providing the preschool opportunity in the first place.

“It would be hard to imagine that society could find a higher yield for a dollar of investment than that found in preschool programs for its at-risk children,” the Committee for Economic Development commented.

If high-quality programs help disadvantaged children, what does this mean for children from more privileged families?

We know from these studies that the preschool years, when the foundation is laid for a child to become a competent young adult, are extraordinarily important. By and large, families above the poverty line have the economic resources, educational background and lower environmental-stress levels to give their children strong psychological and cultural support for learning. If better-off children were to be deprived of these supports, they would probably look and perform much like disadvantaged children everywhere.

While high quality early-childhood care and education cannot fully substitute for a high-quality home experience, it appears to be an effective means of supporting families that need such assistance during this important stage. Such programs provide essential supervision, nurturance and a safe environment. In addition, they provide rich opportunities for social development through interaction with groups of peers.

Is there any evidence that would suggest that such early-childhood care and education outside the home might be detrimental? In general, for children under 3, the evidence is fragmentary, making any conclusions very tentative. For children 3 and older, evidence from nearly all studies appears positive. Disadvantaged children, and those with special needs, appear to benefit extensively, while middle-class children show small improvements in such areas as elementary-school reading levels.

A recent High/Scope study, however, offers some provocative findings about the type of curriculum best for young children. The study traced the effects on disadvantaged young people through age 15 of three distinctly different preschool curriculum approaches--the High/Scope model, a traditional nursery-school model and a model featuring teacher-directed instruction in academic subjects. Both the High/Scope and traditional nursery-school models featured extensive child-initiated learning activities.

In the High/Scope program, the teacher and each child jointly planned the day’s learning activities; the children carried out their plans, then reviewed their work with their teacher. In the traditional nursery-school program, the teachers encouraged the children to engage in free play and in activities that matched their needs and interests. In contrast, the activities in the direct-instruction program followed a prescribed sequence of teacher-child interactions that trained children in precisely defined language, reading and math skills.

At age 15, regardless of the preschool curriculum received, all the study youngsters did better than expected in school because of their preschool experience. There were, however, major differences in social adjustment and behavior. When compared with the youths from the two programs featuring child-initiated activities, youths from the direct-instruction program reported that they committed more than twice as many acts of juvenile delinquency. In addition, these teens reported less participation in sports and extracurricular activities at school, and their families saw them in a less positive light.

While such a study on middle-class youngsters has not been undertaken, these findings should give pause to parents who favor formal academic programs during preschool and kindergarten years.

Early-childhood care and education is here because we need it to support families in which mothers work outside the home. Early-childhood care and education is also an effective tool to ameliorate the problems of disadvantaged youth in our society--not a cure-all, by any means, but a proved method of delivering effective help.

Yet there is much about both short- and long-term consequences of young children in care that we don’t know. Recent efforts to gain federal action in support of child care policies have faltered on this issue. The early-childhood day-care and education field is highly fragmented, with many small local programs competing to provide service. These programs may be organized as either public or private, profit or nonprofit. Head Start still provides national leadership as the nation’s only broadly available program, but it is able to serve only 24% of those eligible under income guidelines.

With recent increases in public funding, public schools are becoming involved in early-childhood care and education, although this step is viewed with considerable concern by both traditional early-childhood care and education specialists and minority spokespersons, who see the schools as insensitive to the needs and problems of the young child.

Information-and-referral networks are springing up locally to help parents locate centers, preschool programs or family day-care providers for their children. Finally, employer-supported child care, a little-researched phenomenon, is also expanding. A Harris Poll a few years ago found that 67% of corporate human-resource executives said they expected to be providing child-care services within the next five years, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce predicts that child care will be among the fastest growing employee benefits in the years ahead.

There is no doubt about the rising demand for child-care facilities: From now until the 1990s, there will be about 4 million babies born each year in the United States; by 1990 the number of children under 6 will surpass 23.3 million, up 23% from 1980. By 1990, the projections are that 10.4 million preschool children will have working mothers.

Early-childhood care and education outside the home is a fact of American life today. With no major negative consequences, with a clear advantage for disadvantaged children and with the demand for services increasing, we must now make sure that the services provided are the best possible for both children and families.