Theories on How Day Care Centers Impact Infants & Toddlers Socially

Day care centers can have a profound impact on small children.

Day care centers often feel essential in modern times. According to ScienceDaily, "in 2005, more than two-thirds of children in the United States who were under five required nonparental child care, a vast majority of whom received care in a child care setting." However, some parents may be curious about other positive or negative effects that day care may have on their children. It's a good idea to examine the prevailing theories about these effects before deciding to place your child in day care.

Increased Aggression

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) conducted extensive studies of children in day care starting in 1989. In 2003, it published findings indicating that there was a direct relationship between the amount of time children spent in day care and the amount of aggressive behavior those children exhibited. Aggressive behavior was indicated by any child that "[shows] cruelty to others, destroys own things, gets in many fights, threatens others, and hits others."

Stunted Emotional Awareness

Day care centers often emphasize a child's behavior (and whether it is socially acceptable) at the expense of his emotional awareness and understanding. For example, a caretaker may simply insist that a crying child stop crying without acknowledging the emotions and circumstances that caused the child's distress or helping the child to understand them. When a child is taught to exhibit outward behavior that does not correspond to his internal feelings, "emotional life becomes degraded as something irrational ... [making] it more difficult for people to take their feelings seriously, to analyze them, and to distinguish manipulation and false pretensions from genuine and spontaneous emotions."

Increased Assertiveness

Some have interpreted the instances of increased aggression found by the NICHD as increased assertiveness. They believe that day care centers make children more individualistic and more analytical of authority than children who remain at home and assert that these traits will help them later in life. Psychologist Alison Clarke-Stewart maintains that "children who have been in day care think for themselves" better than their at-home counterparts.

Decreased Sense of Safety

Many children often feel more vulnerable at day care than at home. This is most often exhibited in chronic biting (that is, biting as a behavior as opposed to biting as a one-time occurrence or result of teething) among day care pupils. In no other setting outside of day care centers does chronic biting occur, and once one child does it, the behavior spreads quickly among the others. Such children are "exhibiting a self-protective animal instinct, which suggests that they feel unprotected," according to researcher Mary Eberstadt.

References

• "The Real Trouble With Day Care. Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs and Other Parent Substitutes"; Mary Eberstadt; 2004
• "Social Psychology Quarterly"; Emotional Socialization in the Postmodern Era: Children in Day Care; Robin Lynn Leavitt, Martha Bauman Power; 1989
• ScienceDaily: Day Care Dilemma: When "Sick" Children Are Unnecessarily Sent Home; April 2010

Resources

• Read this Article in Spanish