Facebook More stories from Sam. Sam Woods is a staff reporter primarily covering education in Milwaukee. When not reporting for NNS, Sam produces the Bridge the City podcast, a podcast that brings together people, resources, and ideas that inspire Milwaukee to action, with a reach of over 6, monthly subscribers across all podcast platforms.
This is the most critical issue facing communities hoping to bounce back from the pandemic. Yimma and Tamara are assets to the community and deserve the respect and compensation commensurate with their contributions to this vital work.
Your email address will not be published. Just last year, an important study found that the culturally liberal outlook of almost all social psychologists had biased the studies and conclusions they reached.
It is likely that a similar outlook, and in particular an unwillingness to present findings that may interfere with women's progress in the workplace, has similarly harmed the work of developmental psychologists regarding daycare. Politicians also need to know what the full range of research shows, especially as they consider policy reforms that could lead many families to change their decisions about how their children are cared for.
President Barack Obama and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton have both called for increasing government's financial support of paid child care, but it is not at all clear that increased use of child care would produce better results for children. In fact, the available research suggests that heavy use of commercial daycare leads to some poor outcomes for many children. Subsidizing this form of child care effectively discourages the use of other arrangements that have not shown these negative effects.
A better policy would help parents in a broader way, providing financial help regardless of families' child-care choices. Acknowledging evidence that daycare may have drawbacks is not meant to demonize parents using daycare. One of the authors of this essay, a mother of five, currently uses part-time daycare for her own children. Like millions of other parents, she believes it is the best option for her family in balancing different considerations such as cost, convenience, and the desire to support a work life as well as ensure the well-being of her children.
Instead, by presenting research that deserves more attention from psychologists, the media, public-policy analysts, and the public, we hope to help parents and policymakers make better, more informed decisions about daycare and child-care policies. The narrative accepted by the vast majority of current researchers has solidified in just the past decade or so.
Researchers now tend to emphasize how negative outcomes fade over time and are balanced out by cognitive gains for daycare children compared to those cared for at home. As the title suggests, this study focused on maternal employment, not paid daycare per se, but the two subjects are clearly related, since women often use paid daycare when they return to work after the birth of a child.
The report closes with this reassuring conclusion regarding the effects of first-year maternal employment on child well-being:. These results confirm that maternal employment in the first year of life may confer both advantages and disadvantages and that for the average non-Hispanic white child, those effects balance each other. The Washington Post write-up of the study quoted Greg Duncan, then-president of the Society for Research in Child Development, explaining the new study's importance: "[It] is 'every bit as important as you might think,' because it suggests mothers can decide, without guilt, 'whether they want to stay home with their children.
Yet the details of the study paint a more complicated picture. The authors' summary conclusions focus on the effects of any "maternal employment" in the "first year. It also mattered whether mothers worked full time as opposed to part time. The authors write, "When we contrast the effects of [full-time] vs. These findings would support the results of earlier studies on the impact of maternal employment and daycare on externalizing behavior. In a study titled "Quantity Counts: Amount of Child Care and Children's Socioemotional Development," Jay Belsky concluded that "early" and "extensive" non-maternal care posed "developmental risks for young children.
When asked what he thought, Belsky was quite critical of both the study and the reporting:. All investigators have to make decisions when it comes to analyzing data, but so many of theirs were questionable. What to me was striking was that while the Post and other papers played up this report, they virtually ignored the one we published 2 months earlier showing both good and bad child care effects on adolescent functioning at age 15 years, including more time in child care through the first 54 months of life, irrespective of quality or type of care, predicting more risk taking behavior and impulsivity.
In fact, many of the most interesting, persuasive, and methodologically sound studies get very little attention. The problem is due in part to the methodological challenges presented by the subject matter. It is difficult to get reliable data about the effects of child care: Researchers will never be able to perform controlled experiments because parents will never agree to randomly assign their children to home care or institutional daycare.
Nonetheless, what results from the use of this data set are observational studies, which are unfortunately not very strong methodologically. For example, the Washington Post recently reported that observational studies seemingly showing that eating breakfast helps one lose weight have been overturned by more controlled experiments. As reporter Peter Whoriskey explains, this is a common phenomenon:. Relying on observational studies has drawn fierce criticism from many in the field, particularly statisticians.
Because of the unreliability of observational studies like those based on the SECCYD data, scientists prefer randomized, controlled trials. The average amount of time a parent spends with their child is very low. Parents should try to spend more time with their children, not less. But studies do show that such behavioral problems arise due to long hours of neglect. You only have to sacrifice your career for five years at most since all kids in America go to kindergarten by then.
If you plan to send your kids to pre-school, children can start in some places as early as two, but usually three years old. Kids deserve better. If you must send your kid s to day care, limit their exposure to 30 hours a week or less. There are plenty of part-time or online freelance work you can do from home during off hours if your household needs to earn extra money to survive.
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Category: Child Care , Public Policy.
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