Day-care dilemma: What's best for kids, families?

In this story: High worker turnover 'Am I doing the right thing?' RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Kathy Slobogin
CNN

(CNN) -- Until two weeks ago Alyssa Lipshie didn't worry about what day care was doing to her children. But a government-sponsored study on child care -- the largest long-term study of its kind in the country -- found that children in extensive child care were more likely to be aggressive, defiant, even mean, than children cared for by their mothers at home. Lipshie's first reaction was alarm, then anger.

"I think it was mean," said the fourth-grade teacher. "My gut feeling is saying that it's wrong, it's absolutely wrong. I have a lot of experience as a teacher with kids that have grown up in day care and the experience with my own children. It hasn't seemed that it would be true at all."

Wendy Williams, an Atlanta paralegal with a 4-year-old daughter in day care, had much the same reaction.

"I took offense to it, to be quite honest. I feel that the whole day-care scenario has been a positive experience for us."

Lipshie and Williams are working mothers. Lipshie, who is married to an attorney, says they could afford to live on one income if they had to, by moving to a smaller home. But she found after staying home a year with her first child that she needed to get back to work.

"I love my child but I wasn't being the sort of mother that I wanted to be. I didn't have the patience I thought I had. I was becoming frustrated with small things and I found that I was slowly becoming depressed."

Going back to work as a teacher relieved the stress. "I was so glad to see my kid at the end of the day that I really think I was a better mother."

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Williams, a single mother, has no choice. Her daughter Samantha is in day care nearly 10 hours a day while she works, but she thinks it's been good for her.

"If I were home with her all day and it were just she and I, she would be bored. I mean she's in a learning environment and she's making friends and that's a huge part of her life now," said Williams.

High worker turnover

Three out of five young children in the United States are in a child-care setting and less than one-fourth of families with young children have a parent staying home. Some 55 percent of working mothers bring home half or more of their family's earnings, according to Helen Blank with the Children's Defense Fund.

"It's really important as we talk about what families need, to be honest. One out of three children whose mothers work are poor or would be poor if their mothers didn't work," Blank said.

Alyssa Lipshie's child attends day care in Washington

She added that the question parents should be asking is not whether day care is good or bad, but why the government doesn't do more to help them.

"I think this country gets a big resounding 'F' in terms of other countries," said Blank. "Other countries start right. They offer families paid family leave ... and then they have high quality child-care that is actually subsidized so parents don't have to take it out of their own pockets."

U.S. parents mostly are on their own when it comes to child-care. Although numerous studies have found that quality day care can enrich children academically and socially, that kind of care requires deep pockets. The day-care center Alyssa Lipshie's child attends in Washington, D.C., for example, costs nearly $1000 a month. Many families find they have to trade quality for affordability.

Dr. Berry Brazelton, a pediatrician whose books have helped a generation of parents raise their children, feels many parents have few options when trying to find good child-care.

"Deplorable, absolutely deplorable," said Dr. Brazelton of the state of most U.S. child-care. "Nearly 80 percent of child-care you or I wouldn't trust with our children. Nor would the mothers. Think what that means to a mother who has to leave her child with somebody else. It's just scary."

Low salaries and high staff turnover compound the child-care problem. Three-fourths of day-care workers surveyed four years ago were no longer on the job, according to a study by the University of California, Berkeley. Forty percent of center directors had left their job during the same period.

'Am I doing the right thing?'

Meanwhile, anxious parents are buffeted by studies such as the latest one from the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development, a branch of the National Institutes of Health.

"It's confusing," says Wendy Williams. "You do stop to think, you know, am I doing the right thing?"

Although many studies conclude that quality day care can give children an academic edge, improving language and cognitive skills, the latest one suggests that may come at a price. It found that 17 percent of children who were in more than 30 hours a week of child-care showed aggressive behavior, as rated by kindergarten teachers and mothers. Only 9 percent of children raised mostly by their mothers showed similar behavior. Surprisingly, the results held even when variables such as type and quality of care were factored in.

However, the research has not been published for peer review and some researchers on the project have taken exception to how it was reported.

"In fact, 83 percent of the children who had to be in a lot of child-care in their preschool years did not show elevated levels of aggression at all," said Deborah Phillips, a researcher and psychology professor at Georgetown University in Washington.

"Even if you look at the 17 or so percent who did, they're completely within the normal range on this measure that we used. So, if you were randomly to pick children from kindergarten classrooms around the country, regardless of their child-care, you would expect to see the distribution that we found."

The percentage of children in maternal care who showed aggressive behavior nearly doubled in the year between preschool and kindergarten, from 5 percent to 9 percent, according to Phillips. One possible explanation -- when youngsters get into a setting with large numbers of other children, a certain percentage will react with more aggressive behavior. The children reared by their mothers, encountering large groups of children later than those with a lot of child-care experience, may simply be catching up.

But Phillips said one of the most important findings has been lost.

"In every analysis we did, parents have a much stronger effect on their children's development that any aspects of child-care. That's a critical take-home message for parents, and that doesn't matter whether the children are in 50 hours of child-care a week or two hours of child-care a week."

Meager pay churns child-care center turnover
April 30, 2001
Day care aggression study should not alarm parents
April 20, 2001
Study: Child aggression linked to hours in day care
April 19, 2001
Guidelines given for keeping kids in day care healthy
February 15, 2000

Children's Defense Fund
National Institute on Child Health and Human Development
American Academy of Family Physician: Day Care -- Choosing a Good Center

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