"Does Day Care Make Kids Behave Badly? Study Says Yes"

Working parents couldn't help but feel a tinge of guilt and self-doubt after picking up the daily newspaper in March 2007. Nearly every major newspaper, television network, and news Web site blazed headlines like "Child Care Tied to Behavior Problems" (Zwillich 2007) or "The Trouble with Day Care" (Lang 2007). These news stories cautioned nervous parents that children who spent considerable time in day care would go on to have more serious behavior problems—like getting into fights, arguing, and being disobedient—by the time they reached sixth grade.

Many parents wrestled with the tough question, Should I pull my child out of day care? while conservative pundits used the headlines to bolster their arguments that mothers should remain in the home rather than work for pay. Yet many social scientists responded to the headlines by urging parents and policy makers to look beyond the sound byte that "child care hurts" and to instead ask themselves what the study really found. The study was based on data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, the nation's longest-running study of child care in the United States. The researchers, led by Dr. Jay Belsky of Birkbeck University of London, tracked more than 1,300 children from birth through sixth grade. They collected detailed data on how the children were cared for and what proportion of their lives they had spent in a variety of different care settings. The study's authors were particularly interested in comparing children who were cared for by relatives, by nonrelatives, and by paid child care providers. They also measured the "quality" of the care received, based on periodic observations of the child care centers. They examined whether the site, duration, and quality of care were associated with a variety of child outcomes, including performance on vocabulary tests, social skills, work habits, emotional adjustment, behavior problems, and relationships with their school teachers.

Belsky and his colleagues did indeed find that children who spent more time in child-care centers had more behavior problems in elementary school, even after the researchers "held constant" or statistically controlled for other possible risk factors for problematic behaviors, such as parents' socioeconomic resources and mental health. However, the researchers did not jump to the conclusion that child care "caused" behavior problems. Rather, they honestly noted that the effect sizes were very modest; that is, the differences in behavior problems between those children in child care versus family care were quite small.

Moreover, the scientists believed that several of their other findings were much more important. First, they found that children who were in high-quality child-care settings went on to have higher vocabulary scores than other children. Second, they found that the quality of parenting mattered much more than where a child was cared for. The authors wrote that "parenting quality significantly predicted all the developmental outcomes and much more strongly than did any of the child care predictors." One reason why parents matter more than child-care arrangement is that they are an enduring presence in the children's lives, while day care is often just a short-term experience. As Belsky and his coauthors noted, "most children...experienced multiple different classrooms and after-school arrangements subsequent to school entry. In comparison, family experiences and parenting were relatively stable."

If the study author himself admitted that child care had only a modest effect, and it was the quality of parenting that mattered for children's well-being, then why did so many TV news anchors caution parents that child care was bad? Many sociologists believe that Belsky's research findings may not have appeared very exciting, so media outlets chose to highlight the more contentious, though less powerful, findings of the study. The media's selective presentation of Belsky's research offers important lessons to sociology students, and highlights questions that every student should ask when the results of a "pathbreaking" new study pop up on Internet news sites each day. This case reveals the important questions that students should ask when they read about a new social science study in the media.