Discuss using evidence the whether or not day-care is good for young children:
Day-care is a term used for describing any situation in which the child is cared for by someone other than its parents for part of the day. Bowlby’s theory of attachment dictates that in a child’s early life they need a primary care giver and that the effect of having numerous different carers (i.e. sending a child to day-care) can in theory cause attachment issues as the primary care giver often switches the care of the child to new people when sending a child to day care however while evidence supports that day-cares may in fact cause developmental problems for young children there is also conflicting data that suggests the opposite is true and that children actually benefit from day-care.
The NICHD study was done in the USA and aimed to find out the effects of day-care on young children. It did this by using triangulation in a longitudinal study that involved 1200 children from when they were born to when they started school. The study found that 3 factors determined the effects of day-care on young children. The first factor being the length of time the child spent in the day-care with the longer the time of prolonged day-care the more behavioural problems the child is likely to have which is similar to the effect the type of day-care has as nursery type day-cares also cause behavioural problems however they also lead to improvements in cognitive and language development. The final factor affecting day-care that this study suggests is the quality of day-care with bad day-care resulting in particular negative effects for the child. While outing a few positives of day-care the NICHD study is generally used to outline negatives of day-care.
EPPE was a similar study to the NICHD however it took place In the U.K which has a different culture and society to the USA though not drastically. Like the NICHD the EPPE was a longitudinal study that followed children from the age of 3-11 to see the lasting effects that day-care made. The study found that long term and midterm day-care made no significant differences but that they both improved social, intellectual and behavioural development and that the improvement in intellectual development was further impacted on if the child was in day-care from A younger age. The EPPE study outlines many advantages to young children in day-care and found no negatives in fact in found that disadvantaged children were better off in good quality day-care especially in cases where they experienced a myriad of social backgrounds. Back to the previous study; the NICHD found that children in high quality day-care tended to lead to them having higher cognitive and language development a statement shared by both studies.
In conclusion there are mixed views over whether day care is advantageous or not for young children however this may likely be due to the societal differences of the two studies as one is done in USA and the other the U.K with the only similarity being that the NICHD (USA study) and EPPE study (U.K) agree that higher quality care leads to better cognitive and language development. The differences in results with the NICHD finding day-care more disadvantageous to young children and being from the USA and the EPPE finding day-care more advantageous and being from the U.K may mean that day-care is different in the two countries or that cultural context has an effect in conjunction with day-care. So in summarisation the evidence suggests that day-care in the U.k is beneficial to young children and is not in the USA