The University of Kansas

Media misses mark on day care study

It made perfect headline material. According to the most comprehensive study of child day care to date, there seemed to be a direct correlation between the time a child spent in day care and the likelihood of aggressive behavior.

But a University of Kansas researcher who played a key role in the study says the findings have been taken out of context by most of the national media.

Carolyn Roy, research associate in human development and family life at KU and principal investigator of the study, says there is no need for parents to panic and pull their children from day care.

“These children are not particularly violent,” she says. “The kinds of behavior the children were showing were well within the normal range for children of this age.”

The study, conducted by KU and nine other universities across the nation, monitored more than 1,300 children nationwide, including 130 children born at Lawrence Memorial Hospital and Stormont-Vail Regional Health Center in Topeka.

Sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a division of the National Institutes of Health, the study found that 17 percent of the children who spent 30 or more hours a week in day care during their preschool years were evaluated by their kindergarten teachers as being aggressive. That compared to 9 percent of children who spent 10 hours or less a week in day care. For the purposes of the study, aggressive behavior ranged from defiance to talking back to the teacher to hitting other children.

Still, Roy says, reporters have neglected to focus on the fact that the majority of children fared well.

“We’re also talking about 83 percent of kids who were in full-time care not showing any increase in these behavioral problems,” she says.

Also lost amid the media hype were other important findings, Roy says. The researchers found that quality and type of day care played a significant role in the development of cognitive skills and language ability in children.

Quality was measured according to factors such as adult-to-child ratio and children per square foot, as well as observation sessions that documented care providers’ behaviors toward the children. This included how well the provider listened to the children and how often the provider asked the children questions.

As for the type of day care, Roy says children in formal day care centers tended to fare better on skills tests than children in the care of neighbors or family members.

Still, she says, this study does not provide a one-size-fits-all answer.

“Of course, it depends very much on the individual -- the individual child, the individual care provider,” Roy says. “But in general, we’re finding that kids in centers do somewhat better academically.”

The study, which began in 1991, started out as a way to examine different kinds of care environments, but quickly grew into something bigger once researchers started analyzing the data.

“Because of the wealth of information we collected at the early years, it became clear we had a great opportunity here to examine children’s development in relation to their other life experiences in and out of the home,” Roy says.

Researchers will try to have the grant extended so they can continue to monitor the children, most of whom are now in the fourth grade.

“We hope to continue it as the children get into the

ir teenage years, since that is such a period of important changes,” Roy says.
Until then, she says, it’s too early to draw solid conclusions from this study. Still, if parents are concerned about behavioral problems in their children, they should talk to the care provider, and, if they are really concerned, they might want to talk to a therapist.

But for the most part, she says, parents should ignore the dramatic headlines and urgent tone of most of the news stories related to these findings.

“This is only one piece of a very large and complicated pie, and until we have more information and have done more analysis, we cannot definitively say anything about whether child care is good or child care is bad,” she says. “There is no reason for panic.”