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| Does child care lead to more aggressive behaviour in kids?
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An interesting new study of 1,000 pre-school aged children in Norway has shown that time spent in early childhood education and care settings has little or no impact on aggressive behaviour in children.
Speaking to the Association for Psychological Science (APS), study lead, Eric Dearing from the Boston College, said the results should come as a great relief to parents worried about the long term impacts on behaviour for children in care.
"From a public perspective, our findings are important because they should help ease parents' fears about the potential harms of early non-parental child care," says Eric Dearing, lead author on the study and a psychological scientist at the Lynch School of Education, Boston College.
According to Mr Dearing as increasing numbers of women entered the workforce in the 1980s, some child development researchers began reporting that child care had harmful consequences for children's social and emotional adjustment. These findings stoked uncertainty and fear among parents, and led to debate amongst researchers in the field.
"Three decades of follow-up studies have only further fuelled this debate. While some studies indicate that beginning care early in life and attending for long hours leads to high levels of behaviour problems, such as elevated aggression, other studies indicate no risk associated with child care," Mr Dearing told the APS.
Mr Dearing and colleagues from the Norwegian Centre for Child Behavioural Development determined that Norway's child care practices offered a unique opportunity for empirically addressing this controversy.
In Norway, most parents have up to a year of parent leave, so children in Norway rarely start attending day care before they are nine months old. Because publicly funded child care centres begin enrolment in August, children typically enter child care at different ages depending on what time of year they were born.
For example, a child born in August would enter child care at 12 months old, while a child born in February would be 18 months old by the time August enrolment opened.
The researchers were able to use this as a natural randomizer; a child's birth month, rather than their parents' preferences, determined what age they started going to care.
Trained assistants interviewed parents of 939 children about time spent in care at ages six months and one, two, three and four years old. Each year, the child's early childhood teacher reported on aggressive behaviours like hitting, pushing, and biting.
"One surprising finding was that the longer children were in non-parental care, the smaller the effects on aggression became," Mr Dearing said.
When the children were two years old, those who had entered at earlier ages displayed modestly higher levels of aggression than peers who entered later. Importantly, these differences in physical aggression diminished over time - regardless of how much time children spent in care.
"At age two, there was some evidence of small effects of early, extensive, and continuous care on aggression. "Yet, by age four - when these children had been in child care for two additional years - there were no measurable effects of child care in any of our statistical models. This is the opposite of what one would expect if continuous care was risky for young children."
"If early, extensive, and continuous non-parental care does, in fact, cause high levels of aggression in children, this study suggests that one year of parental leave, and entry into high-quality centre care thereafter, may help prevent such an outcome," the researchers write.
Given the evidence that early child care is not associated with problems with aggression, the researchers are turning their attention to the potential positive effects that early childhood education and care services may have for children's language development and learning.
The study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
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