WP: Day Cares

[MountainLaurel]

snip

In those early years of the Mommy Wars, questions abounded: Would day care produce a generation of kids who had trouble feeling attached to their parents and were cognitively stunted as well as overly aggressive? Should mothers heed the advice of influential child development experts such as British psychologist Penelope Leach and stay home, at least for the first few years? Just how essential was a constant maternal presence in the lives of babies and young children?

Temple University developmental psychologist Nora Newcombe, whose children are now in their early 20s, vividly recalls those years when she spent "the scant time I had alone in my office worrying about child care, fretting about whether my children would grow up to feel unloved and abandoned" because she had returned to full-time work when they were babies. In an article last year in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Newcombe recalled turning to her profession for guidance and finding a near-total absence of studies that could "allay or confirm" her doubts.

But now, she says, there are answers. Beginning in the late 1990s, results of the federally funded study widely considered to be the gold standard of day care research began appearing. The largest and longest-running investigation into the impact of day care in the United States, the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development was launched in 1991, involved more than 1,300 children at 10 sites and was sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

Among its largely reassuring findings: There were few significant differences between children cared for exclusively by their mothers and those in any form of day care. The most important predictor of children's attachment, as well as their cognitive and social development, researchers found, was the sensitivity of their mothers and the characteristics of their families, such as parental income and educational levels. The influence of these factors trumped any effects of day care.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/25/AR2008082501462.html?hpid=smartliving