ENDEAVOUR FORUM NEWSLETTER No. 110, APRIL 2003

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As the debate about child care hots up, it is important to know what some honest researchers are saying -

Professor Jay Belsky

"Quality, not quantity!" For decades, this has been the slogan for feminists arguing that even extensive day care does not harm young children so long as the quality of that care remains high.  That slogan recently came in for a withering critique from child psychologist Jay Belsky of the University of London. I met Professor Belsky in London  last year, and he is not  at all  traditional  or conservative  in his views.  However, he is honest about the research. 

Writing in the pages of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics, Belsky acknowledges that day-care advocates could plausibly maintain their quality-not-quantity position in the mid-1980s when the "slow trickle of disconcerting evidence" on the effects of non-maternal childcare first began to come in. Their position could not be categorically rejected so long as the studies providing the disconcerting evidence were flawed by their "failure to take into consideration the extent to which caregivers are attentive, responsive, stimulating, and affectionate." As "one of the major weaknesses" of the body of work on day-care effects, this "lacuna" of information on the quality of that care thus extended the rhetorical life of "the mantra of most developmentalists and child care advocates . . . .[who maintained] that 'it is not the quantity (or timing) of childcare/maternal employment that is developmentally significant, but the quality of care.'" But because they have filled this lacuna of information on the quality of day care scrutinized, new day-care studies have-in Belsky's opinion-made it impossible for informed scholars to continue to give credence to this mantra.    

Belsky cites a steady stream of studies from the late 1980's and the1990's documenting the "developmental risks . . . associated with non-maternal child care initiated in the first year, especially on a full- or near full-time basis." The risks detailed in these studies include those of various "behavior problems, especially aggressive problems," "peer dislike," "insecure attachments" to parents. This flow of troubling studies about day care, remarks Belsky, "has continued unabated over the past decade and a half, perhaps even increasing in flow," and has given child psychologists a great deal of evidence "consistent" with the "disconcerting" findings of the research of the mid-1980's. 

Belsky especially underscores the relevance of the recently published National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care. Based on data collected from birth to middle childhood for more than 1000 children from 10 different American communities, the NICHD study carefully examined "a host of background factors," including "the observed quality of child care that children experienced." This study showed clearly that high levels of nonmaternal care - regardless of its observed quality - predicted the emergence of "insecure attachments" between children and their mothers and the development of various kinds of "problem behavior." Typical of the kind of behavior problems examined, elevated scores for "externalizing problem scores" showed up among 16% of the children who had averaged 30 or more hours per week of nonmaternal care during their first four and a half years of life, compared to just 5% among children who had averaged under 10 hours per week of nonmaternal care. The NICHD results, Belsky stresses, "cannot be explained by quality (or type) of child care" because the NICHD research model fully accounted for such considerations. 

It is now quite impossible, in Belsky's view, for developmental scholars and child-care experts to deny that "early, extensive, and continuous nonmaternal care of the kind available in most communities poses some developmental risks for young children and perhaps for the larger society." "Nor," he continues, "would it seem any longer tenable to argue that disconcerting evidence highlighting risks associated with high dosages of child care are simply a function of low-quality care." No matter what the quality or type of nonmaternal childcare researchers look at, they find that "quantity counts when it comes to understanding the effects of early child care on socioemotional development." 

Shredding the Mantra 

Besides shredding the feminists' quality-not-quantity mantra, Belsky discredits their argument that extensive day care makes children "simply more independent and assertive than other children," not more emotionally troubled. In the NICHD study,   the children who had experienced extensive nonmaternal care evinced all the signs of "neediness (e.g., demands a lot of attention, demands must be met immediately, easily jealous), assertiveness (e.g., bragging/boasting, argues a lot), disobedience/defiance (e.g., talks out of turn, disobedient at school, defiant - talks back to staff, disrupts school discipline), and aggression (e.g., gets into many fights, cruelty-bullying-meanness, physically attacks others, destroys own things)."

Such troubling emotional problems showed up among children regardless of the quality of the care they received, regardless of their family's economic status, regardless of their mothers' marital status, regardless of their mothers' education.         

Though the negative effects of extensive exposure to nonmaternal care do not appear particularly large in individual children, Belsky warns that "even small effects, when experienced by many children, may have broad-scale consequences." He  recommends  American policymakers attend to "the stated preferences of American parents of young children who, national survey data reveal, believe  having a full-time parental presence in the home is what is best for young children and that the care  children get from even 'a top-notch day care center' is  not as good as what they would get at home with a parent." Translated into legislation, this means that "tax policies should support families rearing infants and young children thereby reducing the economic coercion that necessitates many to leave the care of their children to others when they would rather not." 

Eyes Wide Shut in the Child-Care Debate 

Arena tends to be a left-of-centre  journal, but in its June-July 2001 issue, writer Julie Stephens  presents a perceptive analysis of Professor Belsky’s findings in an article entitled: “Eyes Wide shut in the Child-Care Debate.”  She writes:  “There is a curious mismatch between the emotional charge in child-care debate and the tediously familiar arguments trotted out, particularly by the pro-child-care ‘lobby’. Whenever any suggestion is made that child-care may have a negative side for children, as  in the latest research by the United States National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD), the same people dominate media discussion and demonstrate a now customary lack of imagination. Social commentators like Gay Ochiltree, Leslie Cannold, Sara Wise and Don Edgar seem ready to spring into action to dismiss any research that is critical of current child-care arrangements.... Many of their arguments  censor rather than open up new  ways of thinking about the care of children”.         

The  Mantra again...   

The mantra is repeated that Australian child-care is different and of a better quality than everywhere else.   Actually our staff to infant ratio is  below international standard.  The  Australian ratio is  one staff to three infants under 12 months of age, and for those over 12 months,   one  to 5.  Any mother caring for triplets would need more help - from husband, grandparents and the local Council. As for five two-year-olds  cared for by one stranger, the very thought is exhausting. 

Julie Stephens says  the persistent cry that working parents have no choice is  questionable because the correlation is between  high income and child-care, not the reverse. 

Revealing Video of Child Care Centre  

Julie Stephens writes that what is missing from the current discussion is the possible perceptions of the infants themselves.   She describes how a few years ago a friend   attended a parent evening at her toddler’s crèche. As a public relations exercise, the crèche   decided to film the activities of the children over a day, and then speed up the film for the parents’ entertainment: “As the daily routine of the children unfolded on film, the initial amusement of parents was replaced by a deathly silence. It would seem that for these well informed, middle-class parents, it was a shock to view the stark evidence of the regimentation, rigid conformity and institutionalised nature of their children’s child-care experience. The film momentarily enabled a different reading of the child-care centre; not just as an environment full of stimulation, toys and activities and things parents would like to arrange for their children if only they had the time, but as something unfamiliar, as an institution first and foremost, with little resemblance to prevailing ideas of family and home. 

“My point here is not to suggest that this is the only‘truth’ of formal child-care. Like adults, children’s experiences are various. However, it is one truth that needs to be confronted if child-care is to be improved and new social policies initiated. Another truth, revealed by the recent findings of the NICHD study, is that babies and children apparently need their mothers.”  (!!! Great new discovery - editor) The study found that the more time children spent being cared for by people other than their mothers, the more aggressive behaviour they demonstrated. This has not been received as a ‘good news story’ for women. The finding has been interpreted as both startling and problematic......  A baby’s and child’s love is particularistic, deeply passionate, excessive, obsessive (sometimes oppressive) and the object of this kind of love, even with shared parenting, is usually the mother”.Julie Stephens calls for more compassionate approaches to those children who never seem to settle in and get over the grieving process.  Child-care centres in Australia — with their appallingly low wages for workers and high staff turnover are also caught up in the rhetoric that they represent the ‘world’s best practice’.        

Julie asks where is the outrage, provoked by such things as the findings of the NICHD study? “Publications like the Melbourne Child inform parents about psychologists who specialise in the treatment of depression for the ‘under fives’. The onus should be on the uncritical defenders of child-care, and the child-care industry, to raise this debate to a different level, a level where genuine criticism and good research is welcomed as a way forward, even if the news is bad”.    Eyes wide shut need to be prised open. 

O Canada!

Beverley Smith,  children and women's rights activist from Canada has decided to do  something about the discrimination against children who are cared for by their mothers at home.   In her Newsletter, "Anchors and Sails", Beverley writes:  “The federal budget as heard today convinces me more than ever that this government has confused the Canadian public by endorsing principles of equality and choice in principle, but passing legislation that seriously discriminates in practice. Finance Minister John Manley   voiced his commitment to 'social equity' for example and yet his proposals fall far short of this principle. He has spoken of the reality most Canadian families live in and yet has addressed only one lifestyle to assist. The violation of the longstanding international promise for social equity in fact has reached a point that I AM TODAY LAUNCHING AN APPEAL WITH THE MINISTER OF JUSTICE TO HAVE THE SUPREME COURT REVIEW SUCH LAWS BECAUSE THEY APPEAR TO  VIOLATE CHARTER GUARANTEES OF EQUALITY. 

The current budget specifically promises $935 million dollars over 5 years to a certain group of children, not all children. It promises this funding only to children who use daycare, thereby excluding the thousands of children in care by neighbors, friends, relatives, and in other informal arrangements.  To favor one group of children over another is not justified on the basis that the favored group is by definition in poverty since very wealthy Canadians can also claim the CCED benefit and the new funding.  The basis of exclusion is simply a lifestyle choice. The state is favoring daycare and such a favoritism is unbefitting a democracy. Daycare children deserve funding but so do all other children. Let the parents decide!

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