Monsters

Day care didn’t produce “generation of monsters”, says Seattle Weekly
Posted Oct 9, 2005, 3:07 PM ET by Jay Allen
Related entries: Child Development, Health & Safety, Lifestyle, Media

Nina Shapiro at the Seattle Weekly revisits a controversial day care study from four years ago conducted by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. The study, which examined the effect of day care on young kids, implied that such kids were more aggressive than their stay-at-home peers - a contention that sparked a war of words between social conservatives and feminists.

Four years and a torrent of apocalyptic headlines later, Shapiro reports that the study’s tentative conclusions were overblown. Analysis of the study’s reports, plus new information from a recent study, shows that day care kids score only slightly below other kids the same age in their social skills and work habits, says Shapiro. Most researchers seem shocked that the difference is so negligible. But Jay Belsky of the University of London is not so dismissive. Instead, he wonders, ”What happens when small effects pile up?”, and asks if the combined effect of these small differences might spell trouble for society as a whole.

What impresses me about this debate is how it’s still assumed that, if the children stay home, it’s the mom who will care for them. In fact, Shapiro’s article doesn’t contain the word “dad”, and it only mentions fathers twice. Have we really made this little progress in the past 30 years?