Day care has small but significant effects on both cognitive development and the mother-child relationship, new research shows.

By Beth Azar
Monitor Staff

High-quality day care may be good for a child?s cognitive development, according to several new studies. In fact, some new research implies that children who spend their early years in center-based care perform better on tests of language and mathematics than children who stay home with their mothers.

Such studies are beginning to answer questions that have plagued parents since women started working outside the home: Does the amount of time spent in child care or the quality of child care affect a child?s development?

Psychologists have tried to design studies to measure the effect of day care above and beyond other factors known to affect development, including a child?s innate predispositions, aspects of parental care and socioeconomic status.

Although mounting evidence suggests that day care has had far less of an impact on child development than these factors, there also seem to be small but significant effects of day care on both cognitive development and the mother-child relationship.

The biggest and best designed study to date, funded by the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development, (NICHD) released findings in April showing that:

? Children in high-quality day care?care that provides a stimulating environment?do as well on cognitive and language tests as children who stay home with their mothers, regardless of how many hours a day they spend in such care.

? Mothers are slightly more affectionate and attentive to their children the less time their children spend in day care.

? Mothers are slightly more affectionate and attentive to their children the higher quality the day care setting.

The study was conducted by a team of 29 researchers?mostly psychologists?who are funded by a 7-year grant from NICHD. They have been following 1,300 families and their children from 10 sites since 1991, beginning when the children were one month old. The results on cognitive development and mother-child interaction are from data collected when the children were 15 months, 24 months and 36 months old.

Stimulating conversation

The quality of the interaction between day-care providers and the children in their care is the most important aspect of day care for fostering children?s cognitive skills, reported the NICHD researchers at the annual meeting of the Society for Research on Child Development in April.

Children whose care-givers asked them questions, engaged them in conversation and responded to them when they spoke, scored highest on measures of cognitive and language ability. These child-care variables contributed between 1.3 percent and 3.6 percent of the variance in cognitive and language development?a rather small, but significant effect, said Sarah Friedman, PhD, NICHD coordinator of the study and one of its investigators.

Another recent study conducted in Sweden found that children in center-based child care scored significantly higher on tests of language skill and math proficiency than children cared for by their mothers or in family-based day care.

The study, conducted by Swedish researchers Anders Broberg, PhD, and Philip Hwang, PhD, of Göteborgs University, and NICHD researchers Holger Wessels, PhD, and Michael Lamb, PhD, followed 146 children from age 16 months to age 8. The researchers regularly measured the quality of home and out-of-home care, child temperament and verbal abilities during the preschool years. And they measured cognitive ability when the children were in second grade.

As in the NICHD study, the researchers found that children who had more interaction with their caregivers scored better on tests of verbal ability. The best predictor of mathematical ability were aspects of care such as small day-care groups, a small ratio of children to caregivers and a narrow range of ages within the child-care group.

The bottom line is that ?child care per se is not placing children at a disadvantage,? said Friedman. ?And those are wonderful results.?

Relationships with mom

Based on results released last year, the NICHD study conclud-ed that child care did not damage the security of children?s attachment to their mothers at age 15 months, provided the children received relatively sensitive care from their mothers. In the most recent analysis, the study found a small link between the amount of time children spend in day care and how affectionate and attentive their mothers were when the children were age 3.

In particular, mothers were slightly less attentive, less responsive and less positively affectionate with their children, the more time their children spent in out-of-home care when they were very young, said University of Virginia psychologist Robert Pianta, PhD, one of the study investigators. But of all the possible predictors of the mother-child relationship, day care only accounted for about 1 percent, he added.

As for quality of day care, the more positive the relationship between children and their day-care providers, the more involved and sensitive mothers were to their children.

?Both quantity and quality of child care has a significant but small effect on maternal attachment,? said Pianta.

One flaw in the NICHD study is the fact that the researchers did not systematically measure the quality of home-based care for children who received full-time care from their mothers, said Pianta. So there is no way to compare low-quality mother care with high-quality mother care or low-quality out-of-home care.

The researchers did, however, look to see if high-quality care could act as a buffer for children at high risk of poor development because of home factors such as poverty or mothers? depressive symptoms. For example, they looked to see if poor children in high-quality care had a better relationship with their mothers than poor children in low-quality care.

?We found slim to no buffer effects of high quality care for these children,? said Pianta.

They also found that low-quality care did not put high-risk children at significantly more risk than high-risk children in high-quality care, he said. The NICHD research group is conducting the same types of analyses for cognitive and language development, said Friedman.

In an analysis from the study now in press, the researchers found that at age 15 months, poor children in home-based day care received lower quality care than children from more affluent homes who were in home-based day care. However, of the children in child-care centers, those from the most affluent and the poorest homes received higher-quality care than children from homes just above the poverty level. This implies that government day-care subsidies provide a safety net for the poorest families while the near-poor must settle for less-expensive, lower quality care, said the researchers.

The next phase of the study will look at how training and experience of day-care providers affects child development, said Pianta. And they still have several years worth of data to analyze before they make any final conclusions about the long-term affect of child care on children.

More complex analyses will be welcome, said Harvard University psychologist Jerome Kagen, PhD. This kind of research has therapeutic value for parents who are worried about how child care influences their children.

But it also highlights the need for more research on the complex interactions between social class, temperament and quality of care and the impact of those interactions on a child?s behavior, anxiety level, and language and cognitive abilities, he added.