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One of the first decisions working parents must make is whether to place their child in a day care center. Preschool programs and day care centers have been studied extensively by researchers, and the reports are usually a mixed bag of risks and benefits.
Occasionally, however, a troubling finding may set off alarm bells. A 2006 study of a popular government-subsidized day care program in Quebec found, among other things, that children in the program showed more anxiety and aggressiveness and were slower to learn toilet training than other Canadian children.
But Ellen Galinsky, president and co-founder of the Families and Work Institute, a nonprofit research center in New York City, said she believed the controversy over day care seems to have subsided. "For so long, there were pendulum swings in public opinion every time a new study reported good or bad findings about day care, but things seem to be quieter now," she said. "It's not that the debate is over in any way, shape or form, but there doesn't seem to be the same level of angst as there used to be."
The consensus of most child development specialists is that participation in day care and preschool programs is associated with improving children's pre-academic skills, language and memory; preparing them for kindergarten; and giving them an edge that persists through elementary school. A recent study of public school prekindergartens in Tulsa, Okla., found that children experienced gains of nine months in prereading skills and five months in premath skills compared with other children their age.
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The downside of day care &emdash; an increase in aggressiveness noted in several studies, including the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, one of the largest long-term government studies supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development &emdash; persists through elementary school, and the more hours a child spends in day care, the worse it is. But many researchers dismiss the problem, saying the increases are so small as to be insignificant.
William T. Gormley Jr., the lead author of the Tulsa study and co-director of the Center for Research on Children in the United States at Georgetown University, said: "One person's aggressiveness is another person's assertiveness. It's important to think carefully and critically about whether mild increases in aggressiveness are necessarily a bad thing."
But researchers agree it is critical that child care programs be of high quality and staffed by well-trained teachers who are responsive to children's developmental needs. (Researchers note that the cognitive advances associated with high-quality care are also associated with high-quality care in other settings, like family care or nanny arrangements.)
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- reprinted from the New York Times