ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, April 4, 1997 TAG: 9704040053
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST
The findings mark the second phase of an ongoing study involving 10 teams of researchers who are following 1,300 families from the birth of their children through age 7.
As a group, children in day care learn to think and talk just as well as those cared for by their mothers, a long-term national study has found.
The study, being released today by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, did find, however, that the quality of care matters: Children whose caregivers respond and speak frequently to them perform better on thinking and language tests than those in settings where they have less verbal interaction.
It also confirmed an earlier finding by the same group of researchers: day care has far less of an impact on children than their circumstances at home, including economic resources, their mother's psychological health and their own temperaments.
While many of the findings should be reassuring to working parents, the study did indicate that placing a very young child in day care for many hours each week has a small negative impact on the mother-child relationship. Researchers found that the more hours children 6 months and younger spent in day care, the more likely their mothers were to show some insensitivity or negative interaction with them.
That could be the result, researchers speculated, of parental stress or weaker bonding that occurs when families try to juggle work and very young children.
The findings represent the second phase of a massive ongoing study involving 10 teams of researchers who are following 1,300 families across the country from the birth of their children through age 7.
The study is designed to answer a question of intense concern to families: Is day care harmful to the social and intellectual development of children?
That question is critical because half of all women with children younger than age 1 are working, and most of those women return to work before their children are 6 months old.
At the age of 15 months, 70 percent of the children in day care were there at least 30 hours a week, the research found.
The new study underscores the conclusion of a growing body of research showing that one of the most important positive influences in a child's early development is a rich and stimulating environment, whether provided by a parent, a day care provider or another family member.
``One very important take-home message is that children in child care are not doing any worse than children not in child care'' on cognitive and language skills, said Sarah Friedman, coordinator of the study. ``For those children in child care, the better the quality of the care, the better the outcome.''
Specifically, it was the tendency of caregivers to engage children in conversation, respond when children spoke and interact verbally with them that led to the highest scores on thinking and language tests, the study found.
``These aren't big, powerful, overwhelming effects, but you can pick them up at different ages,'' said Jay Belsky, a psychologist at Pennsylvania State University.
Deborah Lowe Vandell, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin, said that extended hours in care early in life ``may be a real source of stress for mothers, which gets reflected in their behavior.''
At the same time, however, researchers also found that high-quality care, in which caregivers and children have frequent, positive interactions, could help the mother-child relationship.
Researchers evaluated these relationships by observing videotapes of mothers playing with their children and by visiting the families' homes and watching how the mothers interacted with their children.
The study did not attempt to categorize what type of child care - provided in centers, by relatives or in another family's home - was most likely to offer the best quality. It also did not directly compare whether children in poor quality care developed as well as children cared for by their mothers.
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