Long term effects of early, extensive childcare

[mikidora]

ifstudies.org/blog/measuring-the-long-term-effects-of-early-extensive-day-care

Canadian study - Quebec offered free full-working-day child care for ALL under 5s back in 1997 - 2 decades on the results are quite clear - those children that were put into long-hours care from their early months for most of the week “revealed significant increases in anxiety, hyperactivity and aggression” compared to those that weren’t. Crucially - this long term study shows that these adverse effects persist into adolescence and beyond.

Basically - IF, as a parent(s)/prospective parent(s) you have a choice - cut down work- do a day each separately at home, get relatives in to help if you can and minimise the time your 0-3 yr old spends in ALL DAY 9-5+ childcare.

I know there will be a flurry of “my child is fine...” responses but the point of this study is that they have a large sample size. Much more objective than one parent’s view. This is an overall trend when looking at thousands of children over many years.

I understand many truly don’t have a choice (single parents might well often fall into this category) and must use this kind of extensive child care but if you do have a choice - this makes for sobering reading.

Interesting. Before I put my boy in nursery, I looked a lot at the research and found many studies are conflicting and that mostly it seems to depend on the quality of the nursery and the amount of hours spent there. Under 1s rarely benefit from nursery. Over 1s can benefit immensely but only if the quality is good, as in a good or outstanding nursery. Most nurseries in the UK are much better than those in the US due to our rigorous inspection system. Children who spend more than 8 hours a day at nursery for more than 3 days in a row can also suffer, for the obvious reason that they don't get to spend enough time with their parents.
www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/children-nursery-home-parents-study-develop-oxford-london-school-economics-a7420986.html%3famp
If neither of those conditions are true, then nursery can be highly beneficial and has proven benefits for the child.

It stands to reason that babies and toddlers feel most secure with their primary caregivers. It's a relatively new thing for both parents to need to work, and not really something which is easiest on the child. But sometimes needs must.

You've posted this twice......was that deliberate?

The vast majority of childcare providers in this study were rated as poor.
High quality childcare is actually hugely beneficial.
I'm also weary of the organisation who funded this 'research' ...I suspect they want more women to stay at home so are using this as another stick to beat working mothers.

Op you just come across as judgy and superior.

I agree, nothing positive will come from this post, just another attack on women and the choices they make for their children

The potential for making some people feel guilty about their decisions isn't a good reason not to discuss a topic. People don't have to engage if it's triggering.

Use this to affect your own choices OP; remember that anyone who, like me, had to do to 5 days of 7-7 stints at nursery (bills need paying and cuddles with Mummy wouldn't pay my mortgage sadly) will already feel some sense of guilt and probably don't need that reinforced by some 'research' you've found on the internet.

It’s actually not remotely a ‘new’ thing not to have a parent at home FT with a child. The idea that this is the ideal is a very new one.

OP, thanks for posting.

Agree or disagree, have options or not, I think it’s better to be informed. And we won’t be informed if we object to “being made to feel guilty” by any study that suggests we’ve made mistakes.

Agree @SnuggyBuggy what we're suggesting though is some proper research that looks at different sources and weighs that up. Not one unbiased source.

As for the suggestion it's "triggering" I've neither guilt not shame about the fact I used childcare! And when I read posts on here about women complete dependent in their partner for money I'm jolly glad I kept my career going!!

snuggybuggy discussing a topic is fine ...but when that discussion is based on seriously flawed, biased research there can be issues.

ITs blindingly obvious to anyone that knows anything about child development and psychology that institutional care cannot replace good parenting.
It can enable families to survive financially. It can benefit children where parenting isn’t good at all but clearly isn’t healthy for most under twos. It probably isn’t healthy for two plus children to spend all day everyday in childcare.
I am absolutely convinced it is part of the reason for increased mental health problems and a lack of resilience in children.
It’s a hard message for some to hear but one that should be heard and were forever saying the needs of children come first. It might be an inconvenient truth but that shouldn’t mean it has to be dismissed.

And even if mum was physically at home she would have little time to interact with children. Housework took up much more time before labour saving devices.

There is a huge difference between not having a parent at home full time and having a baby wrapped up at 6am to drop to poorly educated staff in an institutional setting until 6:30pm, having breakfast and supper outside the home too.

There are also studies showing significant increases infant mortality the earlier the child leaves the care of the primary carer.

I agree with @insancerre

Criticism of the affects of childcare never goes down well on MN.

Some people don't have a choice but to use childcare and it's for this reason only high quality childcare should be available. For children under 2 quality isn't necessary an all singing all dancing Ofted outstanding nursery setting.

There will always be the poster who says the worse option is for a child not to be fed and have a roof over their head, but that doesn't mean long term studies should be ignored by everyone. There will be people trying to conceive who should be aware of what's best for children.

In 1938 ,there were less than 4.5k children in day nurseries.These tended to be government funded settings for the where daycare was considered essential- so the very poorest children from broken homes and single mothers.
That whole bit about attention is a red herring too. A mother could interact almost continuously. Work and play were the same thing. A mother could stop washing up and attend to a crying baby. There was less housework to do in some ways.

But there's shit parenting as well. A child could be utterly neglected at home with their mother. It's an unpalatable truth but some parents who've had chaotic home-lives or come from generational worklessness cannot model a better way as they don't know it. Neglect can happen in the home too.

There are also studies showing significant increases infant mortality the earlier the child leaves the care of the primary carer.

That’s pretty shocking - is this uk?

I use a nursery (two days a week, and two days a week with a childminder) so I'll declare that vested interest from the start (unlike that blog piece).

That isn't research, it's a blog piece about research. I have literally just glanced at the original paper - I'll read it properly later, and I don't want to comment much until I do. However, I will note that the effects they're talking about are very small - the blog gives the effects as proportions of the standard deviations, which probably means nothing to most people reading it, but which is a clever way of hiding how tiny the effects are. Also, most of the analysis is done by comparing all Quebec children whether or not they used the childcare programme to the rest of Canada, which involves a pretty dubious set of assumptions.

I started paying less attention to most research on parental choices when I realised that there's no such thing as a random allocation because no one lets a researcher decide whether or not their kid should be in nursery, or sleep trained, or whatever. Maybe DS would be better off with a hypothetical version of me who is the same in every way except she chose to give up work. We don't know, in part because she doesn't exist - that hypothetical woman and I probably make a lot of different choices, so even if she did there's no good way of isolating our working hours from the rest of our lives to decide how it impacts on DS.

I am absolutely convinced it is part of the reason for increased mental health problems and a lack of resilience in children.

I am absolutely convinced that increased mental health problems are due to broader societal changes and increased recognition and diagnosis. Until either of us produce any evidence we'll have to keep being privately convinced, won't we?

A bit of an obscure article, from a fairly biased source, to find for a first post OP.

Why do I feel I should be converted? ds is 15 now, so too late to save him, but thankfully no signs of turning to violent crime just yet 🙄

Don't get me wrong, I'm not convinced this article is the be all and end all of research in this area I just don't think the response on MN would be any different to a scientifically rigorous, peer reviewed, sizeable study across different cultures and social groups. People wouldn't want to know.

I'm yet to see a convincing, robust piece of research on this subject shared on mn.
I'm an academic in an education faculty and know the research pretty well.
My child went to nursery full time.

I agree.
We don't really need a study to tell us that.

To be honest I think you're right that people wouldn't want to know, as it would turn their lives upside down and also, for most people, it would be something they could no longer change at least in part (ie their child has already been in nursery, so if the research showed that it was damaging that damage is already done). I'm not sure I'd want to know, hand on heart.

There's a lot of things people don't want to know and stick their heads in the sand about though. There's a lot of delusion on MN about the wisdom of a woman giving up her financial independence (especially if not married) and the likelihood that she'll easily return to work after a break of several years. The research showing the link between household income and outcomes for children is rock solid (and very depressing) but people don't want to hear that giving up their own earning potential has documented impacts on them and their children. People really, really don't want to hear about the impact of divorce on children. People don't want to hear that cosleeping isn't the safest way for a baby to sleep! We all have areas where the reality of our lives predisposes us to wanting to hear some evidence more than others.