The Day-Care Scare

In the spring of 2001, a press conference held by federally funded researchers generated a flurry of headlines that struck a blow at the core of modern women's lives. "Day care linked to child aggression" was how The New York Times put it. The potential danger of day care was not a new subject; it had been fiercely debated ever since the women's movement sent legions of moms into the workforce and launched a revolution in how young children spent their days. But this press conference carried unprecedented weight. The researchers, most of them developmental psychologists, represented the biggest study that had ever been done on the effects of day care. Coordinated by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the study enlisted researchers at 10 sites throughout the United States, including Seattle, to track more than 1,300 children from birth until an age yet to be determined. Still ongoing—the children will be 15 in January 2006—its aim has been to finally to answer the question, Does day care harm kids?

The suggestion in 2001 was that it does. Or at least, that's what the press picked up on as the scientists announced their findings at that stage. What got the most play was a correlation between the number of hours children spent in day care—or "child care," as it is termed in the field—and a small increase in various difficult behaviors, including bullying, disobedience, and demanding attention. The pundits and editorial cartoonists went wild. The antifeminist camp reveled in the news. "The advocates of 'it takes a village to raise a child' are having a rough month," crowed Phyllis Schlafly in a column.

UW researcher Cathryn Booth-LaForce. (Pete Kuhns)

Feminists weren't pleased. Salon writer Jennifer Foote Sweeney, referring to "screaming headlines" and "deeply traumatic announcements," bashed the NICHD as a "cruel and bullying institution," which, she seemed to imply, had no right to even ask the questions it was asking. "What makes the NICHD think that we have a choice in the first place?" she demanded. Four years later, a recently released book called Child Care and Child Development (Guilford Press, $48) offers many of the study's most important papers collected in one place. At the same time, the NICHD is, at last, getting ready to explain its findings to parents in plain language through a pamphlet due out this November. Most importantly, new study results are in. And what's now clear is that the impression left by the 2001 brouhaha—that the study gave a thumbs-down to day care—is vastly misleading.

A new paper not yet in print shows that the correlation between day care and increased troublesome behavior is no longer evident by third grade. "The effect everyone was so alarmed about seems to have disappeared," says Cathryn Booth-LaForce, a University of Washington psychologist who is the study's principal investigator in Seattle.

The paper, scheduled to come out in the next couple weeks in the American Educational Research Journal, isn't entirely good news. It also shows that while some of the old negative behaviors fade away, some new ones appear by third grade for day-care kids, namely problems with social skills and work habits. Yet the day-care kids, in aggregate, scored only slightly worse than their peers on these behaviors. In other words, the differences between day-care kids and other kids are pretty small.

Indeed, it is just how small these findings are—all the study's findings, including some hailed as good news—that is the most significant, most surprising finding of the entire 15-year effort. To scientists eager for results, it has been a bit of a letdown. "It's so frustrating to have done such a large study and to have found such small differences," says Alison Clarke-Stewart, a University of California– Irvine psychologist who works on the study.

But that's precisely what's so significant. Day care, despite all the controversy, despite the huge shift it has brought in the lives of children, despite even its generally mediocre quality in this country, turns out to be a relatively insignificant factor in how kids turn out. "What we have shown is that there doesn't seem to be any long-lasting effects of good-enough child care," says Susan Spieker, the other University of Washington psychologist involved with the study, referring to day care's generally so-so quality.

While the effects may be small and fleeting, however, they do seem to exist. "The question is, are they important? Is it something to worry about?" says Sarah Friedman, who works in Maryland at the NICHD as the scientific coordinator of the study. It's a hot debate, not least among the study's researchers, several of them big names in the field who have long expressed conflicting views on day care.

Sarah Friedman of NICHD.

"I must say that to me it's a reassuring story," says Friedman. "We're finding again and again that child care is not the source of worry that existed when we started the study."

Offering the loudest dissenting voice is a sharp-tongued psychologist who serves as the study's bad boy and works on it from the University of London: Jay Belsky. "What is more important for society, for schools, for the community," he asks, "a large effect that applies to very few or a small effect that applies to many?" The possibility that many kids who have been through day care may bring their mildly disruptive behavior to school could mean that teachers spend less time teaching and more time managing, he suggests. "What happens when small effects pile up?" he asks. "L.A. has very lousy air. But no one car contributes very much."