The Parent Trap: Who’s Minding Baby? : Children: Will kids in day care grow up to be geniuses? Or dysfunctional adults? A new study will track nearly 1,300 youngsters who are supervised in centers, by nannies or by parents.
It’s the working couple’s constant worry.
You’ve both got jobs, either to make ends meet or to buy a few extras, like piano lessons or private schools. But you’re paying the price. You put in long hours, and your children spend more time in day care or with a sitter than with you. Whether that’s healthy, developmentally, is a question that nags at parents--married and single.
So far, research on the effects of day care has been inconclusive: Some studies suggest that children in day care are more independent and excel academically; others show they may become less attached to their mothers and experience more emotional and behavioral problems later in life.
UC Irvine social ecologists are participating in an unprecedented national study to determine--perhaps once and for all--the effects of child care on children and their families. Their study will track nearly 1,300 children during their first three years in child care--whether it be for only few hours or all day, in a center or preschool, with a nanny or at home with a parent.
Alison Clarke-Stewart, a professor at UCI’s School of Social Ecology and one of the study’s leading researchers, hopes the results, expected in 1996, will ultimately help parents weigh their day-care options.
It is too soon to draw any conclusions from the study, but early observations “don’t give cause for alarm . . . if the quality of care is high,” said Sara Friedman of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the federal agency overseeing the study. “But I won’t be surprised if we find that poor quality or neglect in child care can interfere with (children’s) development.”
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Children from single- and two-parent families of diverse social, ethnic and economic backgrounds, including 120 randomly selected in Orange County, were enrolled in the federally funded study soon after their births in 1991.
Their intellectual, linguistic, social, emotional and physical development are being monitored by researchers at home, in their day-care environments and in a laboratory playroom.
By focusing on the youngsters’ interactions with their parents and their individual personalities and temperaments, researchers hope to get a clear picture of when day care helps and when it hurts.
It may be useful to parents, for example, if researchers can learn how much time spent in day care may jeopardize a child’s development, said Clarke-Stewart, who is also the author of “Daycare,” an overview of day care in America. “Then you would have a clearer idea of what kind of combination of family and day-care experiences work together for good vs. bad,” she said.
Child development experts generally agree that quality day care--in which experienced, well-trained adults work with children--is the key to developmental success.
“Under good quality care, kids thrive. Under bad quality care, kids don’t,” said psychologist Jay Belsky, a Pennsylvania State University professor of human development and a researcher in the child-care study.
“Unfortunately, the overall quality of care in this country is not what it should be or could be,” he said.
His concern is that increasingly younger children and babies are being placed in the care of others for as many as 10 hours a day.
“The 1980s was a decade of dramatic change in the ecology of childhood in America,” Belsky said. “The dramatic increase was not in the number of mothers working but in the timing of their return to work. In the 1990s, I’ve seen data on children under 3 months of age” in extensive child care.
Belsky created a furor in the late 1980s when he reported that babies under a year old in the care of someone other than their mother for more than 20 hours a week are at a greater risk for developing an insecure relationship with their mother and emotional and behavioral problems later in childhood.
“I still believe there are risks associated with early and extensive child care of the kind we know and have in this country,” Belsky said. “People have been very critical of me for having said that, because the 11th commandment of developmental psychology is, ‘Thou Shall Not speak Ill of Day Care in America.’ ”
Clarke-Stewart disagrees with some of Belsky’s conclusions.
“I don’t think the evidence proves there is a risk,” she said. “(Until it does) I think the strategy should be to go slow and be careful and encourage parents to select and carefully monitor the child but not put this sort of guilt trip on them” about child care.
The national child-care study also marks the first time researchers are examining how care-givers who speak a different language, identify with a different culture or have little education affect a child’s development.
Although a language difference can be beneficial if the child becomes bilingual, experts say major educational and cultural gaps between parents and care-giver may warrant concern, especially when the child starts school.
“If you are well-educated and well-resourced and you are handing your children over to a person who has much less of those things, to say nothing of an emotional commitment, that might not be a great exchange for your child, especially if it’s for long periods of time,” Belsky said.
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Leah Heidenrich of Laguna Beach is among those women torn between her desires to pursue her career and to provide adequate care for her baby.
Before the birth of her first child, Heidenrich never doubted her decision to return to work as a librarian within a year.
“I thought it was important for me to stay home for a while and then go back to work. My career was rewarding. It was necessary financially, and it’s what all my peers were doing,” she said.
But after baby Spencer turned 6 months old and it came time to resume her career and to find a nanny for her son, Heidenrich began to panic.
“I was almost hysterical when I started interviewing people for the job. I’ve cried many times,” she said. And although she is confident the nanny she hired is loving and conscientious, Heidenrich said she remains troubled about leaving him in the care of another.
“The fact is, my boy will be spending more time with our nanny than with me, and it makes me feel just terrible,” said Heidenrich, who works 40 hours a week at Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana.
“I think anyone with a lick of common sense knows it’s better to stay home with your baby,” Heidenrich said. “If I could have afforded to take a year off (from work), I would have.”
Debra Dietrich, an assistant professor of English at Cal State Fullerton, has a different view. “I was a better mother because I had a life outside the home,” she said.
She returned to work when her son, Ian, now 14, was about 7 months old, and she believes his development never suffered as a result of her career. If anything, her ability to send him to private schools enhanced his education, she said.
“He is always my primary concern. We have always had quality time together.”
Whether a child benefits from having a stay-at-home mom depends a lot on the mother and her child-rearing techniques, said Mary Ann Sigler, a mother and partner in the accounting firm Ernst & Young.
“If a mother stays home and all they do is watch television all day, then their children would be much better off in a school setting where they are doing creative things,” said Sigler.
Belsky and others agree.
“There is evidence that kids do better in extensive care, for example, if their mothers are depressed or are impoverished and young,” said Belsky.
In her book, published this year, Clarke-Stewart points out that some studies have shown that children in day care “are more self-confident, assured and assertive. . . . They are more cooperative, self-sufficient and independent of adults.”
When they start school, day-care children--especially those who have attended day-care centers or nursery schools--”are better adjusted, more persistent at their tasks and more likely to be leaders,” according to these studies.
But there is another side to the story, Clarke-Stewart said.
These same studies indicate that children in day care are “sometimes less polite, less agreeable, less compliant with their mother’s or care-giver’s demands and requests, less respectful of others’ rights, more irritable and more rebellious, more likely to use profane language, more boisterous, more competitive . . . than children who have not been in day care.”
Moreover, a number of studies have found that kids in day-care centers tend to be more aggressive, Clarke-Stewart said.
“Think big scale,” she said. “One of the problems in this country is a lot of violence. Now think: As a solution to it . . . the way would be to put emphasis in day care on teaching kids how to get along.”
