A few weeks ago, I set out to write a post about daycare. I wanted to provide parents with accurate information about the pros and cons of placing their babies and children in daycare—and by daycare I mean commercial daycare centers.
I wrote the post using information I learned from reviewing some of the research from decades’ worth of studies.
The news was mixed—but some of it was negative—and I wondered how reading this would be helpful to parents who have no choice but to place their babies and toddlers in daycare—or for parents who have already chosen to place their babies and toddlers in daycare.
It is hard enough to find affordable daycare, let alone high-quality affordable daycare—and finding alternatives to daycare such as reliable and affordable babysitters or nannies is sometimes even harder.
And yet it nagged at me: Parents need to know. They need to know the results of the research on the outcomes for children who attend daycare to make informed decisions about what they want for their children.
And they need to know what the important variables are.
But the discussion around daycare is fraught. And it is politicized.
To talk about the potential disadvantageous effects of daycare is interpreted as anti-feminist.
Or it is interpreted as disrespectful of those parents who feel that staying home full time is not suited to their temperament. And this includes parents who had professional training or career aspirations before having their children and/or who find that their work makes their lives meaningful.
Speaking for the Baby
But my question is this: If we take all of this into consideration, who is going to speak for the baby?
We avoid the topic because we don’t want to be thought of as anti-feminist or insensitive to the economic realities of many families.
But I have spent my entire career trying to learn about and to understand children’s emotional development and trying to advocate for children—and I don’t want to stop now.
And this is the thing: My training as a psychologist and a psychoanalyst taught me that babies up to around 2 years of age do best when cared for by one or two primary caregivers. And what I read about the research on daycare did not dissuade me—in fact, it supported what I had already learned.
For optimal development, infants need to be able to form a secure attachment with one or two or even three responsive, loving, stable, consistent adults. And daycares often have babies in a large room with many different carers available.
Babies need to know the smell and the sound and the feel of the one or two or three people who are going to care for them. They need to know the person’s rhythms and their ways of soothing, feeding, and playing. This kind of routine and consistency allows babies to feel safe. It allows them to be able to begin to predict what will happen and when. This is the basis for the development of basic trust.
And this is not political: really!
What is political is whether our society and our government provide parents with the resources to give babies what they need.
We cannot blame parents who need to work because our government has not made adequate provisions for family leave after the birth of the baby for the first year of life.
And we cannot blame parents if high-quality daycare is not available to them when they have to go back to work after a few weeks or months.
Typical leave following the birth of a baby is 3 months. And this is considered generous by many. But babies don’t stop needing their primary caregiver after 3 months.
If they are securely attached to that person, that person is not replaceable. They are unique. And their presence helps to maintain the baby’s secure attachment.
So, we do need to speak up for the babies. What they need is not going to change because we don’t make available the resources that families need.
What is going to change is the health of our babies and children.
Research Findings
Because, sadly, some of the research is worrying. A very large Canadian study found that by four and a half, many hours in daycare predicted negative social outcomes in social competence, externalizing problems, and adult-child conflict, generally at a rate of three times higher than children who did not attend daycare. These children also had higher levels of anxiety, hyperactivity, and aggression than their siblings who had not attended daycare. And differences were found in the sensitivity of mothers in relation to their children who attended daycare.1
Moreover, in a different study, while children were at daycare, they were found to have higher levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, than when they were at home.1,2
We don’t know exactly why these results were found, but we can hypothesize: Since primitive man, babies may have been taken care of by parents as well as relatives and community members, but group sizes were always small. Babies and toddlers have never been cared for in large groups throughout the course of human evolution with a couple of small exceptions (for example, the Kibbutzim in Israel, a social experiment that was heavily researched and discontinued when it did not seem that this arrangement was optimal for children or families).3
At the same time, the research cited above also found that most of the children who attended daycare showed more school readiness than the children who did not.1
So what does this mean?
Well, in my opinion, it means that parents should be careful about making their choices about childcare; they should think about what is important to them, what is best for them, and what is best for their babies and toddlers. They must weigh the pros and cons. And they should think about how to provide as much one-on-one care for their babies and toddlers as possible—whether this means changing their schedules so that their babies spend a shorter day at daycare, whether it means advocating at their daycares for lower teacher-to-baby ratios, whether it means hiring a loving and competent babysitter, or setting up a nanny share with a nanny who can commit to at least 1 to 2 years, or whether it means staying home altogether.
Professional careers may suffer if parents cut back on work—but it is important to ask: Might it be worth it for a few years?
Think about it.
