BC Council for Families

A recent report from the U.S. National Institutes of Health about the long term effects of daycare on kids has created considerable media excitement over the past couple of weeks. The study, "Do Effects of Early Child Care Extend to Age 15 Years? Results From the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development," published in the latest issue of the journal Child Development, is either good news or bad news for parents with kids in daycare - depending on how you spin it.

While CBC news ran this story about the study: Quality child care linked to kids' well-being , the L.A. Times chose to highlight another aspect of the study's results: Day-care kids are more impulsive, bigger risk-takers.

The report is part of a longitudinal study led by Deborah Lowe Vandell, the chair of education at the University of California, Irvine, who heads a team tracking 1,364 children from diverse backgrounds who have been studied since they were one month old, starting in 1991. The latest study results indicate that kids who had attended high-quality childcare scored slightly higher on measures of academic and cognitive achievement as teenagers. However the study also found that at 15, the kids who had spent longer hours in day care as preschoolers were more impulsive and more prone to take risks than the teens whose toddler years were spent largely at home.

While news reports have largely focused on the study's findings about the beneficial effects of childcare - what is being largely ignored is the fact that the study reveals that the influence of childcare on children's development pales beside that of parents'. As the chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch at the NIH has pointed out: "findings from the study indicate that parents appear to have far more influence on their child's growth and development than the type of child care they receive."

In fact, the NIH study, the largest, longest running and most comprehensive study of child care in the United States, has consistently found that the relation between family features and children's development was two to three times stronger than the links between child care features and development. Features of the family and of children's experiences in their families proved, in general, to be stronger and more consistent predictors of child development than did any aspect of child care.
So while parents, policy-makers and child care providers need to pay attention to these findings about childcare, let's not forget that child development doesn't just happen from 9-5. The importance of quality child care can't be underestimated, but neither can the importance of parenting.

The full study can be accessed on the National Institutes of Health website: http://www.nichd.nih.gov/news/releases/051410-early-child-care.cfm