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Childcare - good or bad for your child?
Working parents seem to have been under constant attack of late with a rash of alarming surveys about the adverse affects childcare has on young children. According to a recent report for the Family Policies Studies Centre, children with working parents achieved worse A-level results than those whose parents stayed at home. Even when parents chose the best care, Jay Belsky (Professor of Psychology at Birbeck College, London) claimed that their children would grow up disobedient, badly behaved, insecure and anxious. Then there was the research for the Smith Institute, which showed that when mothers work in the first year of a child's life, it affects their academic achievements later in life.
What we need to bear in mind is that the data used for these reports was gathered from a survey which started 30 years ago at a time when childcare was largely unregulated. So was the 'disobedient, badly behaved, insecure and anxious' behaviour documented really something to write home about? Surely family income, welfare, education and employment prospects were far more significant factors when it came to how children developed in families where parents went out to work?
According to Daycare Trust, the national childcare charity which advises parents, providers and employers on childcare issues, research needs to be rigorous and take into account a range of factors in order to have real credibility. It needs to evaluate the quality of daycare provision including the continuity of care, follow up the progress of children over time and randomly assign children to comparison groups. If child and family characteristics are not properly controlled during research, no truly accurate conclusions can be drawn from the results.
In truth, there's been little systematic research on a large scale into the effects of early childhood education in the UK. The most extensive studies have been carried out in the USA but The Daycare Trust has just published a new report, 'Quality Matters', reviewing the main studies of childcare in this country, Europe and the USA.
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