The economic argument for daycare, particularly World Bank’s if I recall correctly, is based largely on the ability of the child’s parents to participate in the workforce. Thats where $1 for $7 comes from, not reliance on miracles. You short shrift the math in an otherwise informative article.
The specific $7 to $1 figure appears to come from an Obama speech, which in turn comes from a 2009 paper. The $7 comes not from parental workforce participation, but from child outcomes, such as avoidance of criminality later on.
But it's misleading because it is extrapolating from a single 2-year, high-cost program that had 120 children during the 1960s.
My expertise leans towards international development, not so much untangling the tenuous rationales of political speech. The point is that its quite odd to write an essay about the economic arguments for daycare/preschool and completely ignore one of the actual primary factors considered by economists.
To be honest, I had a similar reaction to this article. I did some cursory follow-up readings and found that there is a lot more evidence both pro and con for daycare/preschool/etc, and found this article thus to be wanting. It is much more complicated than the article's thesis.
I really think the claims on both sides are far too simplistic. The outcome, whether negative for the child or, on the contrary, extremely enriching and positive, depends on a combination of factors.
First and foremost, it has to do with the child’s own psychology and individual characteristics, how safe and secure they feel at home, and how well prepared the staff at a given childcare centre are. One centre can provide brilliant care while another can be catastrophic. Even within the same centre, some staff members can be wonderful while others are, frankly, pretty useless.
There is no single statement that can apply to all children and all crèches. What is important, though, and this often seems to be overlooked, is giving parents a choice. They should be able to observe how their child is doing, and have the option of supporting them in whatever way is appropriate, even if that means keeping them at home for a few more months until they reach a certain age or level of readiness.
A couple of observations I would like to make relate to children's health and to child abuse. I have found it quite common that children in childcare are subject to an almost continuous series of respiratory and gastric illnesses. Sometimes they are quite serious episodes. I think one reason is that children at this age have an undeveloped immune systems. Moreover there are parents who send sick children to daycare despite the risk to the rest of the children.
Secondly there is a serious problem with staff abusing children sexually and physically. In the case of sexual abuse the perpetrators are very adept at working around the safeguards that are usually in place. There are a number of cases in Australia where abusers have found gaping holes in the system allowing them to abuse large numbers of children.
In view of this I believe you should keep your children out of childcare unless they no longer wear diapers and that they capably explain what has happened to them.
Both of these downsides seem very worth taking into consideration! The constant illnesses cycling through the whole family seem like a major downside of parenting young kids to me.
This article is a welcome overview over the science on daycare. Note however that there is an additional topic that could be discussed in this context, namely "daycare illnesses":
The statements about the effects of the debates on delaying parenthood or feeling guilty, including the claim that the effects of the debates "may even prevent some children from being born at all", only seem to be based on intuitions. You rightly use the word "may", but it is worth emphasizing that it is unclear whether this really affects the number of children born.
The Venn diagram of 'daycare is bad' people and 'women belong in the home not the workforce' people is a perfect circle. It is pure ideology and nothing to do with concern for the child.
I don't think this is a good approach for finding truth.
We should ask: what would we observe if daycare was bad / good for children under circumstances X (and for measure Y, goodness is probably not uniform).
Sure, in any cases, we would see some people complain that women belong in the kitchen and the nursery room (and that daycare is thus bad). But that doesn't mean the truth doesn't matter. We should try to understand what works and what doesn't abd doing so needs us to be able to at least entertain the idea that "daycare is bad" can be true in some circumstances (just like we need to entertain the opposite idea).
Great article! This seems weird when politicians everywhere are claiming that investment into ECE is great use of the taxpayer dollar, often citing child development reasons. Are they just misrepresenting the research or is the early childhood education they are talking about something different from the "daycare' cited here?
I personally suspect that, although politicians may to some extent genuinely believe that spending on ECE → educational benefit, in practice these claims about educational benefits often function as a bit of a figleaf, and that the main reasons for funding it are:
it can be a short-term way to massage employment and GDP figures (not the same as increasing real wealth in this case - a case of the measure becoming the target in an unhelpful way)
it is a way to very legibly throw money at social problems: we have spent £X to fund children going to daycare from a younger age, etc
The problem with this study is the presentation of everything in aggregate averages. We need deciles and quartiles and etc.
The average toddler that participated in the study had only one testicle.
To quote the article:
As with the persistence of negative effects across development, there is also evidence for the persistence of positive effects when children are exposed to the highest quality daycare
Then later
…, 60% of the universal day care program sites in Quebec were judged to be of “minimal quality.” Just one-quarter of the sites provided care that met the standards necessary to qualify as good, very good, or excellent. Such findings are comparable to many other developed countries, confirming just how challenging it is for children to have access to the quality of care necessary for persistent positive gains over the long run
And so I suggest, as a surprise to no one, the impact of daycare is highly dependent on the quality of the daycare
I second that I think the study should have been included and discussed. Sure, it needs to be taken with a grain of salt (bad daycare quality, relatively high SES of the marginal child profiting from the program), but saying "if there was a large effect, we'd know by now" and then not discussing the elephant-in-the-room study which says there is a large effect feels dishonest.
And I also want to point out that the grains of salt I mentioned for that study are not that bizarre: most readers of this article will be relatively high SES and childcare quality varies. And I don't think the findings are that implausible when I compare them to my own experience when my kids were in full-time daycare (can't speak about the magnitude, but I can believe the direction).
Much may depend on the nature & quality of childcare. With the shortage of manpower in post-WWII Russia, specialized childcare was introduced to get as many women as possible into the workforce. There were specialists for every stage of child growth: from peri-natal through adolescence. As a child grew past each threshhold, it was passed from one specialist group to another. So there was no continuity in the caring, only a series of broken attachments. The result? What was described in Russia as a generation of juvenile delinquents -- малолетний преступник -- or worse.
It’s a good example of how easily biological signals get turned into causal narratives. Cortisol becomes stress, stress becomes trauma, and trauma becomes a claim about longterm brain development without the evidence to bridge those steps.
As “ Jordan Peterson “ put it that could daycare be better than your family or home ?
The child learning to know the parents is subjected to a totally new place and people where he/ she might not be held or treated in the way the child is beginning to know the world .
Learning for a child is in the form of a familiar touch , voice , smell and even what he /she sees around him or her . Basically involving all the senses of touch , taste , smell , sight and hearing .
I think if that is disturbed or varied , it certainly would affect the child in ways manifold.
A child learns slowly to be able to process different/ difficult situations, so giving them space which they aren’t used to might not be positive always .
It seems to me that it is difficult to study the effects of daycare across many daycare establishments and across time. What serves as daycare can vary a lot in terms of what is offered the children, what the qualifications and quality of staff is, how many staff there are, etc. Also, standards for daycare and our expectations of daycare have evolved over time and have been subjected to varying requirements as problems have become apparent, understandings of child development have changed, and goals and ideals have changed.
All of these difficult to control for variables would be expected to influence different experience and different results. This makes it impossible to meaningfully compare outcomes across individual situations or across decades of change. Variations in survey and study methods also complicates meaningful comparison or establishing trends.
One of my immediate thoughts as I started reading this piece was: "It takes a village to raise a child." Daycare is a formally designated aspect of a village that provides opportunities for socialization with peers and influence (for better or worse) by different people, both peers and adults.
Although our daughter had babysitters, she didn't go to daycare. She did participate in an Early Child Development program and in preschool, both of which I think did her some good and as best I can tell did not do her any harm in her development. It is my impression that the people operating both the ECD program and preschool were well qualified to provide good care and experiences. I think daycare is used more commonly now than it was 40 years ago, at least in our area than perhaps in big cities compared to our small town setting.
More recently, my now-young-adult grandson went to daycare that was uniquely structured to provide significant outdoor learning and activity experiences which I think were excellent for him and that he greatly benefited from. As he aged out of that, he actually chose to stay and help with the program for a while which provided him additional learning and socializing benefit. He remembers his experiences there very fondly and I think they provided him with valuable support as he continued developing through his school years.
I'm not aware of anyone I know of who might feel that daycare was a bad experience for their child. Based on news stories, though, I suspect some daycare operations that have been poorly operated and especially if abusive would possibly result in bad experiences for children that could be damaging, so any study results from such operations would skew results toward the negative.
My bottom line (so far) evaluation of complaints is that I suspect there are some people of devious persuasions who are probably trying to cast a bad light on a good thing for some political reason to influence policies and to justify cutting funding and keep women home "where they belong" according to some warped thinking. In other words, creating another manufactured issue.
The economic argument for daycare, particularly World Bank’s if I recall correctly, is based largely on the ability of the child’s parents to participate in the workforce. Thats where $1 for $7 comes from, not reliance on miracles. You short shrift the math in an otherwise informative article.
The specific $7 to $1 figure appears to come from an Obama speech, which in turn comes from a 2009 paper. The $7 comes not from parental workforce participation, but from child outcomes, such as avoidance of criminality later on.
But it's misleading because it is extrapolating from a single 2-year, high-cost program that had 120 children during the 1960s.
https://www.factcheck.org/2013/02/obamas-preschool-stretch/
http://jenni.uchicago.edu/papers/cba_paper_2009-04-17_jlt.pdf
My expertise leans towards international development, not so much untangling the tenuous rationales of political speech. The point is that its quite odd to write an essay about the economic arguments for daycare/preschool and completely ignore one of the actual primary factors considered by economists.
To be honest, I had a similar reaction to this article. I did some cursory follow-up readings and found that there is a lot more evidence both pro and con for daycare/preschool/etc, and found this article thus to be wanting. It is much more complicated than the article's thesis.
No, the stat is for preschool, not day care. They are not the same.
The article is correct.
I really think the claims on both sides are far too simplistic. The outcome, whether negative for the child or, on the contrary, extremely enriching and positive, depends on a combination of factors.
First and foremost, it has to do with the child’s own psychology and individual characteristics, how safe and secure they feel at home, and how well prepared the staff at a given childcare centre are. One centre can provide brilliant care while another can be catastrophic. Even within the same centre, some staff members can be wonderful while others are, frankly, pretty useless.
There is no single statement that can apply to all children and all crèches. What is important, though, and this often seems to be overlooked, is giving parents a choice. They should be able to observe how their child is doing, and have the option of supporting them in whatever way is appropriate, even if that means keeping them at home for a few more months until they reach a certain age or level of readiness.
I strongly agree!
A couple of observations I would like to make relate to children's health and to child abuse. I have found it quite common that children in childcare are subject to an almost continuous series of respiratory and gastric illnesses. Sometimes they are quite serious episodes. I think one reason is that children at this age have an undeveloped immune systems. Moreover there are parents who send sick children to daycare despite the risk to the rest of the children.
Secondly there is a serious problem with staff abusing children sexually and physically. In the case of sexual abuse the perpetrators are very adept at working around the safeguards that are usually in place. There are a number of cases in Australia where abusers have found gaping holes in the system allowing them to abuse large numbers of children.
In view of this I believe you should keep your children out of childcare unless they no longer wear diapers and that they capably explain what has happened to them.
Both of these downsides seem very worth taking into consideration! The constant illnesses cycling through the whole family seem like a major downside of parenting young kids to me.
This article is a welcome overview over the science on daycare. Note however that there is an additional topic that could be discussed in this context, namely "daycare illnesses":
https://blog.ninapanickssery.com/p/daycare-illnesses
The statements about the effects of the debates on delaying parenthood or feeling guilty, including the claim that the effects of the debates "may even prevent some children from being born at all", only seem to be based on intuitions. You rightly use the word "may", but it is worth emphasizing that it is unclear whether this really affects the number of children born.
Thanks for sharing, that’s a great post! A few people have said something about illnesses in response to this piece and I find it pretty convincing.
The Venn diagram of 'daycare is bad' people and 'women belong in the home not the workforce' people is a perfect circle. It is pure ideology and nothing to do with concern for the child.
I don't think this is a good approach for finding truth.
We should ask: what would we observe if daycare was bad / good for children under circumstances X (and for measure Y, goodness is probably not uniform).
Sure, in any cases, we would see some people complain that women belong in the kitchen and the nursery room (and that daycare is thus bad). But that doesn't mean the truth doesn't matter. We should try to understand what works and what doesn't abd doing so needs us to be able to at least entertain the idea that "daycare is bad" can be true in some circumstances (just like we need to entertain the opposite idea).
Great article! This seems weird when politicians everywhere are claiming that investment into ECE is great use of the taxpayer dollar, often citing child development reasons. Are they just misrepresenting the research or is the early childhood education they are talking about something different from the "daycare' cited here?
Thank you!
I personally suspect that, although politicians may to some extent genuinely believe that spending on ECE → educational benefit, in practice these claims about educational benefits often function as a bit of a figleaf, and that the main reasons for funding it are:
it can be a short-term way to massage employment and GDP figures (not the same as increasing real wealth in this case - a case of the measure becoming the target in an unhelpful way)
it is a way to very legibly throw money at social problems: we have spent £X to fund children going to daycare from a younger age, etc
I wrote more about this here! https://capx.co/what-is-childcare-policy-actually-for
not a single mention of the Quebec study? https://ifstudies.org/blog/measuring-the-long-term-effects-of-early-extensive-day-care
The problem with this study is the presentation of everything in aggregate averages. We need deciles and quartiles and etc.
The average toddler that participated in the study had only one testicle.
To quote the article:
As with the persistence of negative effects across development, there is also evidence for the persistence of positive effects when children are exposed to the highest quality daycare
Then later
…, 60% of the universal day care program sites in Quebec were judged to be of “minimal quality.” Just one-quarter of the sites provided care that met the standards necessary to qualify as good, very good, or excellent. Such findings are comparable to many other developed countries, confirming just how challenging it is for children to have access to the quality of care necessary for persistent positive gains over the long run
And so I suggest, as a surprise to no one, the impact of daycare is highly dependent on the quality of the daycare
I think this is a fair critique of the study, but not a reason to exclude it without discussion.
I second that I think the study should have been included and discussed. Sure, it needs to be taken with a grain of salt (bad daycare quality, relatively high SES of the marginal child profiting from the program), but saying "if there was a large effect, we'd know by now" and then not discussing the elephant-in-the-room study which says there is a large effect feels dishonest.
And I also want to point out that the grains of salt I mentioned for that study are not that bizarre: most readers of this article will be relatively high SES and childcare quality varies. And I don't think the findings are that implausible when I compare them to my own experience when my kids were in full-time daycare (can't speak about the magnitude, but I can believe the direction).
Much may depend on the nature & quality of childcare. With the shortage of manpower in post-WWII Russia, specialized childcare was introduced to get as many women as possible into the workforce. There were specialists for every stage of child growth: from peri-natal through adolescence. As a child grew past each threshhold, it was passed from one specialist group to another. So there was no continuity in the caring, only a series of broken attachments. The result? What was described in Russia as a generation of juvenile delinquents -- малолетний преступник -- or worse.
It’s a good example of how easily biological signals get turned into causal narratives. Cortisol becomes stress, stress becomes trauma, and trauma becomes a claim about longterm brain development without the evidence to bridge those steps.
If woman stayed home to care for the children, as used to be the way things worked, daycare would not be necessary.
On the other hand, if women had to choose between 5+ years of income and having kids, most would choose the income.
As “ Jordan Peterson “ put it that could daycare be better than your family or home ?
The child learning to know the parents is subjected to a totally new place and people where he/ she might not be held or treated in the way the child is beginning to know the world .
Learning for a child is in the form of a familiar touch , voice , smell and even what he /she sees around him or her . Basically involving all the senses of touch , taste , smell , sight and hearing .
I think if that is disturbed or varied , it certainly would affect the child in ways manifold.
A child learns slowly to be able to process different/ difficult situations, so giving them space which they aren’t used to might not be positive always .
It seems to me that it is difficult to study the effects of daycare across many daycare establishments and across time. What serves as daycare can vary a lot in terms of what is offered the children, what the qualifications and quality of staff is, how many staff there are, etc. Also, standards for daycare and our expectations of daycare have evolved over time and have been subjected to varying requirements as problems have become apparent, understandings of child development have changed, and goals and ideals have changed.
All of these difficult to control for variables would be expected to influence different experience and different results. This makes it impossible to meaningfully compare outcomes across individual situations or across decades of change. Variations in survey and study methods also complicates meaningful comparison or establishing trends.
One of my immediate thoughts as I started reading this piece was: "It takes a village to raise a child." Daycare is a formally designated aspect of a village that provides opportunities for socialization with peers and influence (for better or worse) by different people, both peers and adults.
Although our daughter had babysitters, she didn't go to daycare. She did participate in an Early Child Development program and in preschool, both of which I think did her some good and as best I can tell did not do her any harm in her development. It is my impression that the people operating both the ECD program and preschool were well qualified to provide good care and experiences. I think daycare is used more commonly now than it was 40 years ago, at least in our area than perhaps in big cities compared to our small town setting.
More recently, my now-young-adult grandson went to daycare that was uniquely structured to provide significant outdoor learning and activity experiences which I think were excellent for him and that he greatly benefited from. As he aged out of that, he actually chose to stay and help with the program for a while which provided him additional learning and socializing benefit. He remembers his experiences there very fondly and I think they provided him with valuable support as he continued developing through his school years.
I'm not aware of anyone I know of who might feel that daycare was a bad experience for their child. Based on news stories, though, I suspect some daycare operations that have been poorly operated and especially if abusive would possibly result in bad experiences for children that could be damaging, so any study results from such operations would skew results toward the negative.
My bottom line (so far) evaluation of complaints is that I suspect there are some people of devious persuasions who are probably trying to cast a bad light on a good thing for some political reason to influence policies and to justify cutting funding and keep women home "where they belong" according to some warped thinking. In other words, creating another manufactured issue.