Is Day Care Bad?

Does day care have an effect on a child's development? Many parents wonder if they are making the right decision in sending their child to day care or if they should just stay at home. Studies show that day care can have a slight positive effect on children's cognitive and language skills, especially in children from poor families. However, the day care must be very high quality. The more cognitively enriched the child's experience was, the higher the child's later cognitive performance was. Nonparental care also showed effects on a child's personality are sometimes positive and sometimes negative. While children are more sociable and have better peer playing skills, this only holds true for those children who were in high quality day care. Negative effects include increased aggression and lower ability to get along with teachers and other students, during preschool and later years. One researcher, Bates, found that the longer a child spent in day care, the more likely they were to reap the negative effects of the program. Another researcher, Jay Belsky, found that there was a slightly heightened risk of insecure attachment among infants who entered day care before their first birthday. Cortisol levels, a hormone linked to stress, are proven to increase in those children who are placed in day care, where cortisol levels are not heightened in those children who stay at home. Essentially, poor quality day care seems to be more of the issue than actual day care itself. Therefore, if parents are considering placing their children in a day care program, they need to do a lot of research before deciding which program to go with, and decide upon one that is a good fit for their family.