I've been reading articles about the study of kids who have and haven't been in day care. The three main points, in order of significance, were that, by 6th grade, (1) parenting has by far the most significant effect on behavior, (2) there's a slight correlation between increased hours of day care and disruptive behavior in school, although the level of disruptive behavior was well within the range of normal, and (3) there's a slight correlation between high quality day care and better vocabulary scores. I'm still trying to figure out how this translates into headlines like "Day Care Linked to Bad Behavior."
Take a look at the assessments this study does; there are nine pages of assessments and questionnaires in everything from friendships to use of after-school time to quality of adult interactions. It's thorough. And from all of this, what is the result? Kids who go to day care have no behaviors outside the range of normal. That's the real news here: Day care has virtually no lasting effect on kids. Of all these assessments, the only thing to report is a slight correlation between disruptive behavior and kids who have been to day care; but that disruptive behavior is within the range of normal.
And a final thought: people tend to forget that the the point of raising kids is not to minimize your own annoyance, it's to wind up with functioning adults. In light of this, why is disruptive (within the range of normal) per se bad? I would think that the least disruptive kids are the most timid, which might lead to trouble navigating the world as an adult. At my son's parent-teacher conference, he got kudos all around. They also mentioned, as a minor thing, that he sometimes corrects the teacher and shouldn't do that. Is that disruptive? Well, yeah, a little. But is it something that's going to lead to dysfunction as an adult? Isn't it just as likely that the behavior results from intellectual curiosity, confidence, and willingness to question authority, and that those qualities will help him as an adult?
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