Day Care Wars

The NYT
has an article on a study conducted on the effects of day care on children''s behaviour. It is interesting that effect is so slight 1%, but the headlines, "poor behaviour is linked to time in day care" try to depict a much larger percentage. It's a great way to make working mothers feel guilty about sending their kids to day care. Not one of these articles has spoken about the high cost of day care, Bright Horizons for instance costs $1200 a month, making it unaffordable for most working parents Another concern that I have heard parents speak about is the high rate of infections susceptible infants pick up while at day care.

A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade.

The effect was slight, and well within the normal range for healthy children, the researchers found. And as expected, parents’ guidance and their genes had by far the strongest influence on how children behaved

The L.A. Times put it all in more perspective.

At least, that's the message I took from a recent USA Today article about "Alpha Moms" — "educated, tech-savvy, Type-A moms with a common goal: mommy excellence." The Alpha Mom "views motherhood as a job that can be mastered with diligent research." Who'd want to be a Beta or Gamma Mom when Alpha Momhood is within reach? So I dug deeper into the day-care story.

My scrutiny paid off. Way down in paragraph 15 of the Times story, we finally get to the nitty gritty: "Every year spent in [day-care] centers for at least 10 hours per week was associated with a 1% higher score on a standardized assessment of problem behaviors completed by teachers."

At first, I thought, 1%? 1%? That's a story?

But I quickly realized that I was thinking about things the wrong way. From the perspective of an Alpha Mom, that 1% difference in problem behaviors wouldn't be written off as within the margin of error. That 1% could be the critical difference between a kid who eventually goes to Harvard and a kid who ends up in juvenile lockup.