first you accuse the EPPE and NICHD studies of having 'vested interests' [never explained] and consequently that you anecdotal experience is just as valid as evidence [stating something with force does not make it true]Then you change tack and say that actually both studies have been misinterpreted by the media. Perhaps the academic leaders of the studies would know better?
From the Guardian article I linked to earlier:
'All this research is grist to the mill of Professor Jay Belsky, of the Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues at Birkbeck, University of London. An American with a florid turn of phrase, he has cast himself since the mid-80s in the role of the Jeremiah foretelling doom as day-nursery provision first took off in the US. He claims that his career has been blighted ever since. Initially, he found no evidence that daycare carried risks, but, "In 1986, I began to see a slow, steady trickle of disconcerting evidence which I could no longer explain away and maintain my intellectual honesty. I pointed out that the evidence indicated risks firstly, when care was initiated in the first year of life, secondly, when infants received daycare of more than 20 hours a week and which was continuous until school. At the time, both were rapidly becoming the norm in America. I was portrayed as someone who wanted women in the kitchen; people who had lauded my career now said I had manipulated and distorted the evidence."
Belsky's concerns and the ensuing row was one of the factors which led to the setting up of the NICHD study at the cost of more than $100m (£54m). Belsky worked on the study; he argues that it has vindicated his concerns. The team observed mother-infant interaction for the first 36 months of the baby's life: "We found that the more time the infant spent in care, the less sensitive and harmonious relations were between mother and child at six, 15, 24 and 36 months.
"The biggest risk factor for insecure attachment is insensitive mothering and the impact of that is significantly increased by any one of three risk factors: more than 10 hours of nursery daycare a week in the first year; a change in the childcare arrangements in the infant's first year, and low-quality daycare.
"In the late 1990s, the NICHD studies concluded that the more time children spent in childcare, irrespective of its quality, the more aggressive and disobedient they were between two and six years old, especially so for group care. The mantra in childcare became quality, quality, but the outcomes we saw were not just a function of low quality. What we found was that good quality care predicted better cognitive and linguistic functioning - there's good news as well as bad here - but the more time in care, the more aggressive the child was at two. That aggression disappeared by three but was back at four-and-a-half and older. Those kids scored higher for aggression, disobedience and neediness."
Belsky concedes that he is talking about small average increases - day nurseries do not lead to an increased number of psychopaths - but argues that if large amounts of care in day nurseries for infants are now the norm of American childhood, and likely to become the norm in the UK, the incremental impact has to be considered.
"We have to ask whether a teacher with a class of 30 children, most of whom have been in daycare, is likely to find half of them are a little more aggressive and disobedient? Would that mean the teacher has to spend more time managing the class rather than teaching it? We have to consider the consequences of more and more children spending more and more time in group childcare arrangements, most of which are not high quality. No one wants to be responsible for making mothers feel guilty, but this has to be openly and honestly discussed."
What concerns Belsky since he arrived in the UK in 1999 is that the UK is gradually adopt ing the American model of high maternal employment, mothers going back to work earlier and high levels of daycare. He has made himself the bete-noire of many researchers on both sides of the Atlantic with his tendency to use inflammatory metaphors; he talks of "a steady trickle of pollution seeping into a lake" as cohorts of daycare children grow up.
While Belsky seems happy to stir up controversy and is, therefore, anathema in some government policymaking circles, his close colleague at Birkbeck, Professor Ted Melhuish, picks his words more carefully. He is probably the most respected academic in the field of childcare in the UK; he worked on the EPPE study, and is heading the £16m evaluation of the government's flagship programme for pre-school children, Sure Start. He has just completed a review of all the international research on childcare for the National Audit Office, which found other studies, such as one from Norway, substantiating the Anglo-American research.
"The quantity of daycare under the age of two affects some aspects of social development - there's a slight risk of increased disruptive, anti-social behaviour and children less likely to obey rules and be less cooperative," he tells me. "You start to see it once children are spending 20-25 hours in daycare and the risks increase when they are spending more than 40 hours in daycare, which is not atypical if the woman is in full-time employment with two commutes."
What preoccupies him is whether it is possible to identify what causes these negative consequences, and if they could be reduced: "We know the importance for infants in the first two years of responsive, individual attention for significant parts of the day to develop their socio-interactive skills. We also know that the responsiveness of group care is much less than in other childcare settings such as childminders. To improve the responsiveness of group care requires maintaining very high staff-infant ratios and keeping staff turnover down to an absolute minimum: both are very expensive."
You have also put words in Leach's mouth to suit you own opinion and backed it up, not by a quote from her new book, but by a quote from an online reviewer of her new book. As an academic skilled in research this is an odd way of proving your argument.