Study Says Day Care Affects Bonding but Not Learning

The most comprehensive study ever conducted on the effects of day care has found that young children in the care of others while their parents work generally suffer no disadvantage in cognitive or linguistic development.

But the federally funded study, which so far has tracked more than 1,300 children from birth to 3 years of age, concluded that when a child spends long hours in “nonmaternal” care, the quality of interaction between that child and its mother is slightly eroded.

The more hours a child spends in day care, the study showed, the more negative and less sensitive a mother is toward the child in situations observed by researchers. At 2 and 3 years old, a child cared for by others also is less affectionate toward his mother in proportion to the amount of day care that the child received.

Collectively, these measures of mother-child interaction are considered strong predictors of a child’s sense of security, and, in turn, of the child’s overall emotional well-being. Researchers called the link between a child’s hours in care and poor mother-child interaction weak but statistically significant.

The researchers concluded that no variation of day care--long or short, good or bad--was as important in determining a child’s emotional and intellectual well-being as are the circumstances of the child’s family life.

Dr. Duane Alexander, director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, which sponsored the study, called the finding that children’s cognitive development is not harmed by day care “the most striking aspect of these results.”

But he cautioned that the quality of the day care was an important condition for such an outcome.

The study comes at a time when unprecedented numbers of U.S. women with preschool children are in the paid labor force. Government statistics show that 62.3% of mothers with children under 6--a total of 10.3 million women--work for pay either part- or full-time.

The vast majority of these women use some form of day care for their children--either a paid arrangement with a day care center or more informal arrangements with relatives or in the homes of other families. The federal study is based on research involving all such arrangements.

Use of day care is likely to swell in coming years as welfare reform efforts push as many as 4 million poor women into jobs. This surge of new working women--many of them single parents with special needs but scant funds to pay for child care--is certain to raise many of the questions addressed in the new study concerning the quality of child care and the length of time children should be in such situations.

“Child care variables” provided a significant additional prediction of a child’s emotional and intellectual future, the study concluded. But by far the most significant factors in determining how well a child fares were family economic status, the mother’s psychological well-being and intelligence, and infant temperament.

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If a mother--especially one with a rich vocabulary and stable family finances--talks frequently to her baby and responds to the child’s needs, the child is more likely to develop strong maternal bonds and a solid cognitive foundation, irrespective of the child’s day care situation, said researchers.

“If you had a choice between placing a child in a well-functioning, economically secure family or in high-quality child care, these results say, choose the former over the latter indisputably,” said Jay Belsky of Pennsylvania State University, one of the study directors. “But this doesn’t mean that child care doesn’t matter--we’ve seen that it does. It only means that relatively speaking it matters substantially less than what’s going on in the family.”

The study concluded that the quality of young children’s day care arrangement can make a small but significant difference in terms of intellectual growth and the emerging bond with their mothers.

High-quality day care--most frequently provided at large child-care centers--boosted children’s cognitive and linguistic development and at several ages even improved the quality of their interaction with their mothers.

By contrast, when poor women placed their children in low-quality care--most of it informal baby-sitting arrangements with friends or relatives--they were found to have a less-healthy interaction with those children at 2 years of age.

The findings, which are being presented at a conference in Washington today, represent the second phase of a massive ongoing study involving 10 teams of researchers who are following 1,300 families across the country from the birth of their children through age 7.

The first phase of research, released a year ago, concluded that day care by itself did not harm children’s emotional attachment to their mothers.