Time for Parenting...

...because raising children is a full-time job

May 2001 Newsletter

Editorial; Daycare Damage; In Your Own Words; What The Papers Say; "Children: A Financial Forfeit"; Your Letters

Daycare damage: new evidence

Children in daycare from infancy are less compliant, more aggressive, less popular and are more likely to have behavioural problems than peers whose mothers were at home, according to new research from Professor Jay Belsky.

Professor Belsky has recently been appointed director of the new Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues at London University's Birkbeck College, where he is involved in ongoing child development studies. His latest research is drawn from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Child Care study (NICHH an ongoing review of more than 1,000 US families. For all proponents of increased daycare it will make disturbing reading.

It was back in 1986 that Professor Belsky first drew attention to the possibility of damage from early daycare, returning to the subject in a 1988 paper on non-maternal care in the first year of life. Showing that babies in daycare for more than 20 hours a week had difficulties forming attachments to their mothers, Belsky also pointed out that daycare in the early years increases non-compliant and aggressive behaviour between the ages of 3 and 8.

At a time when mothers were being widely encouraged to return to work and use substitute daycare, Belsky's doubts about the advisability of separating mother and child for long periods were of course unpopular. But he has not been deterred, and his latest research underlines his original concerns.

In the new report 'Developmental Risk (Still) Associated with Early Child Care' Belsky reviews the evidence accumulated in the last ten years, concentrating especially on infant-parent attachment and emotional development.

That evidence includes new reports from the NICHH surveys which show that more than just 10 hours of non-maternal care in the first year of life could adversely affect mother-infant security. So could having more than one caregiver in that first year. And it is not just the mother-child relationship which is affected - where the child is a boy, it seems that long periods in non-maternal care in the first year have a negative impact on the relationship between the infant and his father.

As to the question of aggressive behaviour, Belsky's new summary again confirms his earlier thesis that children who spent more than 30hrs a week in daycare from infancy were rated as non-compliant, more aggressive, less popular and more likely to have behavioural problems than peers whose mothers were at home. Interviewed earlier this year in the Financial Times, Belsky was asked why he thought this might be. He replied 'It may be that a child is trying to develop a sense of the world around him and stability and consistency with a mother figure is important to that. Take that stability away and this may engender an inability to manage your own emotions, to develop social skills; and that fosters the aggression, the non-compliance.'

Belsky stresses that he is not fundamentally opposed to daycare, provided it is used moderately, but feels that parents and society should be aware of the risks before embarking on a big expansion of daycare. After all, a handful of aggressive and insecure children in a classroom might be manageable; if half the class has been in daycare from infancy, imagine the problems. (Imagine also the consequences for these children in their teenage and early adult years.)

Belsky argues that his findings - which relate to children born in the past 10 years - should not be ignored just because they make uncomfortable reading. Naturally enough, he also argues that mothers should not be coerced back into work if they would rather be with their children.

The benefits of staying at home to care for your under-5s have also been underlined in recent research from Essex University. Professor John Ermisch of the Institute of Social and Economic Research measured variations in academic achievements between siblings brought up differently. He found that for every year a mother works full-time before her child starts school, the child's prospects of gaining at least one A-level fall by as much as 9%. By looking at children of the same family, the survey avoided possible distortions for social class and mother's education. The only variation in the child's upbringing was the amount of time the mother spent with her child.

This research supports FTM's argument that policies to push mothers into paid work can have expensive consequences. It found that longer periods of employment by mothers during the pre-school years also increase the child's risk of unemployment and of experiencing psychological distress as a young adult.

Yet when the Ermisch report was released in March this year, the media coverage focused, as usual, on how working mothers might react. Would this make them feel guilty? What about mothers who have to work for financial reasons? No one is bold enough to suggest that we should question the structure of a society where mothers can only be 'fulfilled' if they are in paid work and where family incomes are more heavily taxed where there is only one earner. Reports like these should make us all ask whether supporting maternal care might be a better use of funds than subsidising daycare.

As long as the priority is reassuring working mothers about the lifestyle they have chosen, there will be no attempt to improve the lot of mothers at home. Surely it is time to say 'put the children first' - and make your policies fit the child's needs, rather than the other way around.

For details of Professor Belsky's findings visit minerva.psyc.bbk.ac.uk/staff/jb.html. For a summary of the Ermisch report -'The effect of parents' employment on outcomes for children' contact Joseph Rowntree Foundation Tel: 01904-629241 http://www.jrf.org.uk.