Is child care harmful?

You have probably seen the newspaper articles this week about the recent study on child care. The lead in the vast majority of the stories tends to be about "problem behavior". The Seattle PI story had the headline "Study Links Child Care to Problem Behavior".

The lead paragraph states that the research shows that the more time that children spent in child care, the more likely it was that their sixth grade teachers reported problem behavior. The second paragraph stated that if the children were in high quality child care they had better volcabulary scores in fifth grade than children in lower quality child care.

The headline in the the Science Daily was different "Early Child Care Linked To Increases in Vocabulary, Some Problem Behaviors in Fifth and Sixth Grades."

There are also some discrepancies in the articles themselves re: the findings. The bottom line is that the increase in vocabulary and in problem behaviors was small and that the quality of parenting is much more important in predicting a child's behavior and the size of his vocabulary.
The research itself is an NIH, (National Institutes of Health) funded longitudinal study of 1,364 children who have been tracked since birth and are now in fifth and sixth grade. It is important to note that the researchers evidence of problem behavior was within the normal range. You would not be able to walk into a classroom and pick out the children who had been in child care.

What I find disturbing is the fact that this was big news for several days and that so many people only saw or heard the words "Child Care" and "Problem Behaviors". Most likely, few people took the time to read the article -so many parents are left with doubts and concerns about whether they should keep their children in child care.

What was lost in the Seattle PI article was the difference between the children in high quality child care and low quality child care. The Science Daily article was much more accurate and balanced and I suspect it was read by a much smaller audience.

Those of us in the field of Early Learning need to be pro-active and prepared when these stories come out so that we can re-assure parents they are making the right choices and are doing the right thing for their children.