Daycare is NOT associated with behavior problems in 10,000+ children across 5 countries

[kingdomkings]

@yahwhshua Thank you for explaining, I was struggling to get my head around this element too.

 

[yahwhshua]

@damacri First, true experiments are the best available evidence. If not, analyses that control for or stratify by age, given what we know about how daycare has different effects at different ages. As I said above, lumping infants in with toddlers and 3 year olds data will of course produce less significant or in this case, null results. That’s just statistics. There could be 20 babies with extremely poor outcomes, and the 70 toddlers with amazing outcomes, and mean of those outcomes will still be average or good.

 

[damacri]

@yahwhshua We also have studies demonstrating null evidence by age of entry, so I’m not sure why the positive effects should be given priority. Those studies are not better just because they see an effect. They’re not proven to be the ground truth, so they cannot be assumed to be confounding this study without evidence.

However, there is evidence that at least one of the studies included in the analysis did not show significant effects of age of entry, which would suggest there is not huge statistical masking of combining ages, at least in this sample.

 

[grampster]

@damacri Has anyone read the full study? The abstract doesn't provide important context- i.e the quality of the 'day cares'. I've worked in early childhood settings for 20+ years. They are definitely not all the same.

A child spending 60 hours a week in a setting with a constant turnover of adults, with no routine or consistency. Limited resources or lack of enriching play on offer. With adults who may or may not have any training, experience or even like their jobs is going to have very different outcomes, and it will 100% have an impact on their behaviour. These places exist in abundance. Even average places will have aspects of this low quality provision.

 

[meganm112611]

@grampster This.
Everything you are saying is spot on.

I also worked in a preschool/daycare, and despite people being well trained, they were not well paid and had a high turnover rate. By the time a child who'd been there since infancy was 4, they'd had about a dozen primary caretakers-- without the turnover which made it more like two dozen.
These were not a village of people caring for the child. These were employees with varying degrees of intention and educational background, with no biological imperative to give the best care to each and every child.

I want to see the longitudinal studies on mental and physical health on the children who are raised in daycares.

I was one of them. Sure, I was well behaved. Until I hit puberty, but even then I was like a trained monkey during school hours.

At 42, I still have trouble figuring out where all my anxieties and attachment issues stem from.

These studies are asking the wrong questions, unless it's well behaved automatons we're after in the parenting game.

 

[dcantrell]

@grampster I dug into everything in this comment chain.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ScienceBasedParenting/comments/11dxmcg/daycare_is_not_associated_with_behavior_problems

Most of the studies are incredibly vague on the things you're asking about.