I think these studies are worth noting, because many people today tend to assume the opposite (not that day care is better, but that there is no difference). And I think there has been some devaluing of the role of the stay-home mother, who according to these studies, is performing a role that cannot easily be duplicated elsewhere.
Of course, some will point out that it all depends on the quality of the individual day-care center. (FTM, the comparison also depends on the quality of the parent as well). But as a practical matter, it may not be possible for everyone to get high-quality day care. The best is always going to be better than the rest, and it is not reasonable to just say that everyone should be as good as the best.
(Of course this is not to make light of the financial and other circumstances - including psychological well-being - that can cause people to put their children in day care. The issue is what is the optimum).
Yes, I agree that it would be ideal if one of the parents could stay home and raise the infant \ child. As you said, that may not always be possible. I thought this bit at the end of the article was interesting:
In a way it’s common sense - if you give your child love and attention they will be happy - not exactly “breaking news”…
I would tend to disagree with your statement that there is a tendency to devalue the role of the stay-at-home mom. I think people are just dealing with economic realities by continuing to work.
I think utilizing daycare can improve the quality of the time you spend with your kids.
There is no question the sensitivity of the parent is vital to a child’s overall development. IMO when a mom is home with the kids all day there is an exhaustion factor that kicks in and lessens the mom’s sensitivity toward her kids.
So take your pick:
Mom all day (maybe half the day mentally exhausted)…or
Daycare during the day paired with sensitive and engaged parents during evenings.
And dads which wife would you rather come home to?
Maybe I’m trying to convince myself…
I think utilizing daycare can improve the quality of the time you spend with your kids.
There is no question the sensitivity of the parent is vital to a child’s overall development. IMO when a mom is home with the kids all day there is an exhaustion factor that kicks in and lessens the mom’s sensitivity toward her kids.
So take your pick:
Mom all day (maybe half the day mentally exhausted)…or
Daycare during the day paired with sensitive and engaged parents during evenings.
And dads which wife would you rather come home to?
Maybe I’m trying to convince myself…
When my son Alex was about 1 year I went back to work and we put him in daycare.
It was a wonderful place, exactly what every parent hopes for. A nurse, Lisa, who was staying home with her kids and taking in a few more. They had a small farm near her house and on many days she would take all the kids to it to play with the ducks, goats, etc. She had a huge backyard with lots of toys. And most important of Lisa she was always loving and gentle with the children.
He was there for about a year and a half until my second child was born and I decided to stay home. While Alex was there he was too little to give me a detailed description of how he felt about it, besides to indicate that Lisa was always nice to him.
A while later, when he was older I decided to drive by Lisa’s house. I asked him if he remembered it. He said, “Yes. I remember Lisa, she was always lots of fun and going to the farm was great. But I was sad most of the time. I wanted YOU and I felt lonely all the time.”
It broke my heart. I thought Alex was too little to have such intense feeling of longing and loneliness. But he wasn’t.
Except that an awful lot of parents find it difficult to be sensitive and engaged during the evening after a long day at work. My husband seems to be pretty happy to come home to me, I don’t know about anyone else.
And are you sure that SAHMs get that exhausted every day? Some do, some don’t; it depends on your situation, resources, support, and how ornery the kids are that day. I would say that I (as a SAHM) get worn out sometimes, but certainly not every day. It gets much easier when you have friends to play with and other parents or friends to talk to; when you have something to do, even if it’s just a trip to the grocery store; or when you have family or very close friends in the area to rely on. Current summer temperatures are not helping, but smoothies are. A SAHP who makes an effort for variety, social life, and a reasonably organized life and home is a much more cheerful SAHP, IME.
[anecdotal evidence] When I worked at a grade school, I could really tell the difference between the kids with a parent at home or working part-time, and the kids with parents who both worked full-time. The day care kids were more easily distressed and less independent–much more likely to come running to a teacher with every tiny problem. They also tended to cling to adults more, and seemed to crave conversation with a grown-up. My SIL, a teacher, says she has noted the same thing. [/anecdotal evidence]
Well, lots more to say, but I have some stuff to do. Back later!
As long as we are bandying around anecdotal evidence…
I live in a 12 home cul de sac and 9 of the homes have stay at home moms. By the time I get home from work several of the moms are usually out in front of someone’s house cussing and discussing the days trials and tribulations looking bleary eyed (especially toward the end of the week) while the kids are running wild in the street and yards. Many definitely suffer from mental exhaustion and the sensitivity quotient defiantly drops throughout the day and week. Not every mom and not every day but the correlation is definitely there.
The working parents may be tired form their days too, (forgive me if this seems a bit abstract) but it’s a different kind of tired and there is still plenty of “engage the kid fuel” in the tank.
I agree it depends on the situation and the quality of the daycare as well as other factors but IMO quality time outweighs quantity of time.
Re quality vs quantity-
I wonder how much of the difference between the children with a stay at home parent and the ones in day care is due to which parents choose to stay at home. When I was young ('60’s and early '70s) most of the women in my neighbrhood were housewives. And I use the word “housewives” for a reason- their priority was doing their housework, not spending time with their children. When my friends and I were too young to be outside alone, we were confined to one room of the house. When we were old enough to play in the backyard, we were sent out, often with the door locked behind us so we couldn’t get back in the house on our own. When we were old enough to play outside with other children, in the summer we were not supposed to return home until lunchtime, and then to go back out until dinner. My mother had a reputation for being one of the nicest mothers, because she would let us in to use the bathroom between meal times- some of the other mothers didn’t allow that. If children were allowed to participate in extracurricular activities, it was one activitiy per family-if your older brother bowled, you bowled or did nothing. I actually spend more time with my children, even though I work full-time than those women did, unless you count merely being in the same building as spending time with your child. It seems that now, most of the women who would do that either don’t have kids to begin with (not an easy option then) or work outside the home (also not an easy option then). But I wonder how much difference there would be between children with stay at home parents and those in daycare if the stay at home parents weren’t mostly there by choice.
I’ve always figured that once a child is 3 or 4 years old, some kind of nursery school is a really good thing, for at least part of the day. Any opinions on that?
Excellent point, doreen! My mom stayed at home with us because that’s simply what women of her class did. But I think she, and us kids, too, would have been happier if she worked outside the home, at least part-time. She loved us, but she didn’t really like children in general. I know she craved adult company. She has a very no-nonsense, super-organized personality–one that would be great in the business world.
Despite this, I tend to think that children are better off, at least until 3 or 4, if they can stay home with a parent. However, lots of families simply can’t afford it. I’m not talking about “oh, we want a McMansion and a new car, so we both have to work;” I’m talking about “we have to pay for the kids’ insurance somehow, so we both have to work.”
I’m thinking of things like Hilary Clinton’s famous “I could have stayed home and baked cookies” remark. Of course, that’s one remark from one person, but it reflects an attitude that does exist. (Personally, I incline to think the attitude is an unintended byproduct of feminism. Although theoretically feminism merely demanded the freedom for women to pursue careers, as a practical matter it inevitably tended to promote and glorify that option. But this is a separate debate).
Doreen, I can’t imagine your experience was all that typical - I’ve never heard of such a thing. But I agree that there are some people not cut out for raising children, as burundi points out - I alluded to this in the OP by referring to quality of parents and their psychological well-being.
I think the quality vs. quantity thing is extremely over-rated. Obviously if you lock your kid in a room all day you are not raising that kid, but beyond extreme cases like that who is to say what is better time? Taking your kid shopping with you vs. reading them a book? Baking a cake with them or playing them a game? I am skeptical.
I have a child in day care, so of course I cringe at these sorts of findings. I don’t dispute them wholly–I can see where it is stressful on a small child to be away from its parents, no matter how loving the caregiver, and also that they may suffer somewhat having to compete for (or wait for) attention, since most day care settings can’t stay afloat without multiple kids per caregiver. It’s a choice I made, and I can live with it, just as I can live with the fact that we don’t drive a Volvo, and that I didn’t exclusively breastfeed, and that I don’t give me kid organic foods all the time.
However, I do wonder–in any population of children and mothers, aren’t your sample going to be somewhat biased? There is some self-selection into the two groups studied. It’s not entirely random. That is, the kids who stay home with their moms are more likely to have moms who have the temperament for being a SAHM. If you pulled every child out of daycare and made all their mothers (or fathers) stay home, would the entire population of children show the same lower stress levels and lack of aggression as the SAHM-kids in the original measurement? I find it more credible that some of these kids would not appear to be that much better off.
I also believe that there are some kids with extremely busy parents who probably pull the stress and aggressive level average up. In my son’s first day care situation, there were two kids whose dad was a medical resident and whose mom was a consultant. The kids were often there 10 hours a day, and I often heard the older daughter crying because her mother was out of town again and she missed her. It was so sad to hear my daycare provider help her count out “how many sleeps” until she saw her mom again. There are surely some kids like that in any daycare sample, but they are not typical.
The whole stay-at-home mom thing is a fairly new invention. Anytime before the middle of the last century, chances are that both your parents would be pretty busy doing farm work all day. You’d probably be left in the care of grandparents or one of your many brothers and sisters. Anyway, there’d be so many kids running about that the kind of all day one on one attention we think is necessary for proper child development would be impossible. And if you were in any sort of upper class, you’d probably be raised by a nurse or a nanny.
So a daycare most accurately reflects how humans have been raised for most of history. I don’t see why we feel so beholden to this abberation of a pattern that emerged due to specific economic conditions (which have now changed) in the mid twentieth century. Kids are important, but they arn’t fabrage eggs. They’re not going to break if you don’t do every absurd little things that “experts” find improves them just a tiny bit. What is important is love. And that can be found and felt through an amazing endless configurations of lifestyles.
Having worked in day care for several years myself, I will say that in general, the more time children spend in each other’s company, developing social skills, learning to experience the world on their own terms, the better.
Is anyone surprised that shy kids show more signs of stress in the social setting of daycare? But what is the alternative? Try to provide them with an environment where they will NEVER have to encounter other people whose objectives may run counter to their own? What sort of nurturing is that?
HOWEVER, I will say that younger children do not benefit from a great deal of time spent in the stimulating environment of day care.
I have worked in a program where, at the parent’s option, a child who attended morning session kindergarten could be in day care after school until 6 pm. The whole REASON for split session kindergarten is that the normal school day is too long for very young children. They need time in a quiet familiar environment to process whatever they’ve taken in during a short day. Until first grade, there should be a family caregiver to supervise the child at home, although SOME daycare for this age is beneficial to their social development.
My kids will be in preschool soon enough and I think they will benefit by having me around for the first few years. Also economically I did not have a job that would have paid daycare costs and made it worth it for me to work.
However, I think parents need to be involved in the daycare their children attend. Stop in unannounced and really listen to what their children/other parents/teachers are saying.
I saw my brother go through a few really bad daycare scenarios because they were all my parents could afford. I also visited one where a friend worked and hated how they spoke to and treated the children. I also saw one girl spray a changing area to clean it and end up drenching a kid sitting in a nearby high chair eating lunch. (I brought that to their attention but do not know the eventual outcome for the worker involved.)
Well said even sven!! My feelings exactly! I’ll have to remember that the next time my mom gives me crap for working instead of staying home with my kids!
I see several people are hailing this post, so it cannot pass unchallenged. This is an unsupported assertion, and one that I believe to be completely bogus.
It is my - equally unsupported - assertion that for the overwhelming majority of people and cultures throughout recorded history, mothers have been the primary caretakers for their children. The situation you describe of women doing farm work all day with the children being taken care of by grandparents or siblings was an aberration, if it ever existed (as the norm) at all (and I am skeptical even of that).
Where in the world did you get this idea from?
(In addition, even if what you say were true, I would posit that there is an enormous difference between being raised by extended family and being raised by professional strangers. But I don’t want to argue this point, because I disagree with your entire premise, as above).
IMO, the needs of the child are different at different ages. I believe different concerns come to bear if you are talking of daycare for an infant, pre-schooler, or grade-schooler.
I agree. We were fortunate enough that my wife could stay at home with our kids until the youngest was two and a half. I think that being away from mommy is really the hardest on the babies.
But at two and a half my daughter loved “baby school”. She was with a nice group of other kids her age, and the teachers made sure the entire day was structured and filled with activities. If she’d stayed home with my wife she would have been playing mostly by herself and watching lots of television.
Of course, we’re paying through the nose for this wonderful environment … .