rePost::The long-term effects of day care

So did time spent in day-care affect school performance? We can't say for sure: remember, this study just measures correlations, and a correlation can't tell us if one factor causes another. But there are some interesting correlations. There is a small, but significant correlation between quality of care received in a child-care center and vocabulary scores. Interestingly, this correlation continues to be significant all the way through the fifth grade. There's also a significant correlation between number of hours spent in child care and “externalizing” behaviors such as misbehaving in school or hitting others, but this diminishes with age. Externalizing is significantly correlated with the proportion of child care provided by day-care centers, and this correlation does extend all the way through to the sixth grade.
But the factor that most strongly predicted both academic success and good social skills throughout the study period was quality of parenting. If the mother-child relationship in those short video assignments demonstrated good parenting skills, then the child was more likely to have good reading, math, and vocabulary scores and have healthier social skills. But even here, we must be careful not to assign parenting as the cause: It’s possible that parents simply get along better with kids who are naturally brighter and friendlier.
But let’s suppose the correlations are due to causation: good parenting makes good kids, and day-care makes for very slightly smarter, but also slightly less well-behaved kids. What does that tell us about whether or not to put kids in day care? On an individual basis, not much. A parent may be faced with a decision to put her child in day care or move to a cheaper house in a worse neighborhood. A small probability that the child will be slightly more aggressive in ten years probably doesn’t play into it much. But, the study authors suggest, it might make a difference on a larger, community-based scale. If ever-larger numbers of kids are placed in ever-more-inadequate day-care facilities, then schools and playgrounds could be adversely affected, which could mean a worse future for everyone.
One thing does seem clear from these results: both high-quality child-care centers and good parenting skills are associated with better results for kids. Perhaps future studies should focus more on how to make both of those things even better.
via The long-term effects of day care : Cognitive Daily.