Good News for Working Parents: Long Hours at Day Care Will Not Worsen a Kid's Behavior

Relief for working parents, as a recent study states, kids who spend long hours at daycare will not have behaviors worse than others. The long hours may help them get better at social interactions.

A new study from the Institute of Early Childhood Policy at Boston College revealed that children spending a significant amount of time in childcare centers do not correlate with having negative behaviors like bullying, hitting, or biting.

Moreover, the study discovered some positive connections between children staying and spending time in daycares and their behavior down the road. It can even boost school performance in the future.

Working parents reassured

The research looked into more than 10,000 preschoolers and toddlers who participated in seven studies about child daycare from 1993 to 2012.

As researchers checked and compared the data, they found that these kids tended to spend more and more time in daycare centers as they grew up and got older. Yet, there was no link to "unwanted or negative externalized behaviors" like picking fights, hair pulling, or even restlessness when these kids are outside the daycare environment.

According to UPI, millions of parents depend on childcare centers, dropping their toddlers off daily so they can go to work. However, these parents wind up with serious guilt about it.

One of their main concerns is that time spent in daycare centers might encourage their children to start acting out.

"The fact that we find no relation between spending time in center-based care and children's externalizing behaviors is reassuring for parents, given the current trends in child care use and parental participation in the labor force," said study author and co-director of Fundación Apapacho, Catalina Rey-Guerra.

These words comfort working parents who feel guilty about dropping their kids at daycare centers.

Director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, Dr. Shawna Newman, agreed with the study stating that for parents who choose center-based daycare, the study is actually "extremely reassuring and encouraging."

Newman further emphasized that there has been no proof that time spent in daycare centers results in more externalizing behavior like outbursts and aggression among children. But, she knows there are positive benefits to center-based care - it can enrich a child educationally, effectively provide age-appropriate and developmental opportunities for learning, and offers social and emotional support.

Other research says otherwise

Previous research, however, had suggested otherwise, but Rey-Guerra countered that the majority of studies were done "purely correlational," which means that there can be many alternative explanations as to why kids who spend long hours in daycare centers are at risk other than center care per se.

Other factors, like the center staff's friendliness, the center being understaffed or not, or the center's cleanliness, could be alternative reasons for children who spend a lot of time in daycare centers to act out, Scary Mommy reported.

Moreover, Dr. Carol Weitzman, a pediatrician in the Division of Developmental Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, emphasized how these previous studies "could have been faulty" because of society's expectations of motherhood. It is possible that the idea of spending long hours at childcare centers every day can lead to kids having behavioral problems can be "inherently sexist."

The doctor is wondering whether there is an underlying bias that is going on with the notion that kids with lesser maternal care will grow up worse and have threats to attachment.

She further stated that with women and mothers compromising almost 50 percent of the American workforce, the question should instead be about how to ensure quality and affordable care for their children and how to build and implement child-friendly parental leave policies and work strategies.