Disruptive behavior linked to time spent in day care

Dallas Blog | Caroline Walker:

“Results are in from the largest and longest-running study of American child care: keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class &emdash; and that the effect persisted through at least the sixth grade, The New York Times reports Monday morning.”

Ed Cognoski responds:

There are many possible factors at work here that need to be considered before drawing conclusions from this study about the value (or lack of value) in day care.

Isn't the conventional wisdom that one-on-one attention from a mother or father in a home setting should lead to superior outcomes on all sorts of measures? Don't most people who rely on day care do so out of necessity, not out of a belief that day care is a superior setting for preschool children? Aren't the results of this study surprising only in that the benefits of home care are not more pronounced?

Whether even those minor benefits of home care are real or not is not decided by this study. There was no control group in the study. Whether the children in the study were in day care or not was a decision made by the parents. Could it be that parents of disruptive preschoolers are more apt to enroll their already disruptive children in day care? We don't know. Cause and effect is impossible to determine from this study.

And what is meant by "disruptive?" Is it always a bad thing? Are inquisitive, innovative, energetic children sometimes labeled "disruptive"? Sure. Could it be that day care instills more self-confidence in children and that what's later interpreted as being "disruptive" is nothing more than that? We don't know.

I have no objection to people believing that home care is superior to day care. It seems a reasonable belief to hold, even without scientific studies to back it up. And I don't think this study does much to back it up. It certainly doesn't prove that day care is injurious to children's upbringing. Parents should continue to do what is best for their own situation, whether that's home care or day care for their preschoolers.