What Are The Negative Effects Of Daycare

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In this paper I will be discussing how the experience of full-day, out-of-home daycare positively and negatively affects preschool children’s behaviors, school performance later in life, and relationships with both peers and superiors. During the last half of the twentieth century, America has witnessed a rapid increase in the percentage of women in the workforce and a corresponding rise in the number of children who receive routine care by someone other than their mothers. Children are entering child care at younger and younger ages. By 1990, in the United States, over half of the infants under one year old regularly received care by someone other than a parent (US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1994). At age 24 months, children …show more content…

Quality of early child care has emerged as a protective factor of familial social risk (measured by maternal education, family income, household size, and maternal depression) in terms of academic achievement in elementary school. A report based on a large national survey found that children of low-income families benefited more in terms of cognitive—academic performance when they experienced more hours of child care (labeled a compensatory effect), whereas children of middle-income households functioned more poorly when they experienced more hours of child care. In other research, more time in center care predicted larger academic gains among low-income than middle-income children. Today, the mothers of half the infants in the United States work outside the home. This concerns psychologists and parents because of the possible detrimental effects on these infants of separations from mother and experience in day care. Available data suggest that infants whose mothers work full time are somewhat more likely as one-year-olds to avoid their mothers after a brief separation and later to be less compliant with their mothers and more aggressive with their peers. The argument that these behaviors indicate that infants in day care are at risk for emotional insecurity and social maladjustment is evaluated in light of current research results. It is concluded that other interpretations of the data are more plausible and that further research on the factors moderating and mediating the effects of infant day care is

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