Day Care (Edexcel A-Level Psychology): Revision Notes
Day Care
What is day care?
Day care refers to any organised or casual arrangement where a child receives substitute care from someone other than their biological parent. This can take place in formal settings such as nurseries, with childminders or nannies, or informally through relatives like grandparents. The type of day care environment can shape a child's social, emotional and cognitive development.
Grandparents typically care for one or a few grandchildren and often provide more intellectual stimulation and emotional support compared to childminders who may look after several children simultaneously. This note focuses on formal day care provided in nursery or preschool settings.
Research into day care
Research examining day care has concentrated on three specific aspects of child development:
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Social development - The capacity of a child to interact with peers, including their level of independence, shyness or aggression
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Emotional development - The attachments children form and their ability to cope with various situations
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Cognitive development - The intellectual growth of a child, assessed through IQ tests or standardised measures like GCSEs. SATs (Standardised Assessment Tests) are used to evaluate literacy and numeracy skills
Bowlby predicted that children in day care would experience maternal deprivation, particularly those attending before age two or spending extended periods away from their caregiver. However, research findings have been mixed: some studies indicate positive effects, others show no effects, and some suggest children experience negative consequences from day care attendance.
The advantages of day care
Andersson (1992)
Research Study: Swedish Longitudinal Investigation
Study details:
- Participants: 119 Swedish children tracked longitudinally until their eighth birthday
- Aim: To examine the developmental outcomes of children who attended day care at different ages
- Procedure: Children who started day care before age one were compared with those who began at older ages or remained at home. School teachers rated the children's social skills, and academic performance was measured at ages 8 and 13
Key Findings: Children starting day care before their first birthday were rated as more socially advanced by teachers compared to those who began later or stayed at home. These children had more friends and demonstrated greater outgoing behaviour. Day care provided increased opportunities to develop social skills. They also achieved better academic outcomes at ages 8 and 13 than children cared for at home or starting day care later. Both social and cognitive benefits were linked to the onset and duration of day care attendance.
Evaluation:
Strengths:
- Swedish day care receives substantial funding, and the children studied came from families of higher socio-economic status whose mothers had higher educational levels
- Sweden offers extended maternity and paternity leave compared to the UK, allowing children to spend more time with parents before parents return to work
- The positive effects found were mediated by these factors related to wealthy families in a particular culture
Weaknesses:
- The findings may have limited generalisability beyond Sweden's well-resourced system
- Confounding variables such as family socio-economic status and parental education levels make it difficult to isolate the specific effects of day care itself
The Effective Provision of Preschool Education (EPPE) project
Research Study: UK Longitudinal Investigation
Study details:
- Theorist: Sylva et al., 2004
- Participants: Over 3,000 children in the UK tracked longitudinally from age three to seven
- Aim: To investigate the effects of different types of day care provision (home care, nurseries, preschools, playgroups) on child development
- Procedure: Researchers created developmental profiles for each child based on SATs results, observations by staff, parents and school teachers. They also recorded parental qualifications, social background and birth weight to examine how these mediating factors interacted with day care effects
Key Findings: Children benefited both socially and intellectually from preschool care, particularly when they started before age three. High-quality provision with well-qualified staff produced better social and cognitive development. Cognitive effects remained evident at the end of Key Stage 1, with children achieving higher scores in mathematics and literacy.
Evaluation:
Strengths:
- Large sample size increases the reliability and generalisability of findings
- Longitudinal design allows tracking of long-term effects
- Controlled for multiple mediating variables including parental qualifications and social background
Weaknesses:
- Advantages appeared contingent on factors such as good-quality day care provision, characterised by appropriate staff-to-child ratios, positive staff-child interactions, low staff turnover, and highly qualified staff
- Cannot establish causation due to the correlational nature of the research
The disadvantages of day care
Belsky and Rovine (1988)
Other researchers have not found such positive effects. Jay Belsky and Michael Rovine used data from two longitudinal studies in America examining day care effects on attachments formed between parents and children in the first year of life.
Using the Strange Situation Procedure to assess attachment types with mothers and fathers, they discovered a higher incidence of insecure-avoidant attachment types (43%) amongst children attending more than 20 hours of day care per week during their first year compared to those attending fewer than 20 hours. They also found that boys whose mothers worked full-time and therefore attended day care for 35 hours weekly had more insecure attachments with their fathers.
This suggests a negative effect of day care on emotional development. However, Clarke-Stewart (1989) criticised using the Strange Situation Procedure as a measure of attachment for children in prolonged day care because they become familiar with being left with other people and therefore do not respond in the same manner as children unaccustomed to being left with other adults. Children with regular day care experience are routinely left with other adults and develop independent behaviour that may be misinterpreted as avoidant behaviour.
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) study
The NICHD followed 1,364 families from birth to first grade to examine the relationship between day care and development of American children from various socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds and family structures.
They found that high-quality day care was associated with cognitive development. However, they also found that day care was associated with more behavioural problems, particularly aggression, compared to children cared for at home. This was particularly evident in low-quality day care provision.
Individual differences
Increasingly, researchers examine how day care affects individual children, as some children demonstrate greater resilience and cope better with separation than others. Day care may benefit independent and outgoing children with social skills, but shy children may be adversely affected by constant social activity.
Temperament and Day Care Quality Interaction
Pluess and Belsky (2010) found that children rated as having difficult temperaments were affected differentially by both good and poor-quality day care and parenting. Children rated as difficult in temperament benefited most from good-quality day care and sensitive parenting, and suffered most negative effects in poor-quality environments.
Good-quality care appears to help them regulate their emotions within a supportive and sensitive environment, but such children can become overwhelmed by poor-quality environments, leading to academic and behavioural problems and teacher-child conflicts that extend to middle childhood.
Evaluation
Problems exist when investigating whether day care has advantages or disadvantages for children's social, emotional and cognitive development.
Methodological Limitations of Day Care Research
A substantial issue is that children are rarely randomised to specific types of childcare environments. A randomised controlled trial would involve children being randomly assigned to one specific type of childcare to distribute mediating factors such as child temperament and socio-economic status. Clearly this is impractical in most cases, and therefore researchers must conduct complex statistical analyses of these mediating factors to isolate the roles and interaction effects caused by day care.
This becomes a statistical challenge, as the home environment, child temperament, day care quality and other factors often interact to have differential effects on outcomes for each child. Not every factor that could mediate or interact with day care effects can be measured, as they are too numerous to investigate, so some variables may not be recorded.
Day care research is correlational and therefore any associations found between day care and outcomes cannot claim a causal effect. Comparing different types of maternal and non-maternal care environments also makes research examining their effects difficult. Every day care provider has different qualities, such as staff ratios, staff wages and resources, making them difficult to compare with other providers. This probably accounts for the lack of agreement in research findings into day care.
What makes good-quality day care?
Ratios and training
The quality of day care provision is associated with better cognitive and social outcomes for children. Low staff turnover ensures consistency of care, good staff-to-child ratios help form substitute attachments, and staff training and qualifications indicate good-quality day care provision.
In a review of staff ratios, training and group size, the Thomas Coram Research Unit (2002) analysed day care literature across many countries and established firm recommendations for the Department for Education and Skills, including better standards and clear guidelines for staff-to-child ratios and staff training.
The current Early Years Foundation Stage statutory framework (2014) requires that managers of day care centres hold at least a relevant level 3 qualification as a minimum, and half of staff should hold a relevant level 2 qualification.
| Country | Age | Staff to child ratio |
|---|---|---|
| UK (National standards) | 0-2 years | 1:3 |
| 2-3 years | 1:4 | |
| 3-5 years | 1:8 | |
| 5 years | ||
| USA (No national standards, varies state to state) | 0-9 months | 1:3-1:6 |
| 10-18 months | 1:4-1:9 | |
| 19-27 months | 1:4-1:13 | |
| 28 months to 3 years | 1:7-1:15 | |
| Spain (National standards) | 0-1 year | 1:8 |
| 1-2 years | 1:13 | |
| 2-3 years | 1:20 | |
| 3-6 years | 1:25 |
Key person
The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) established a statutory framework for quality care provided by day care provision in the UK, including provision of a key worker within the environment for each child.
This key worker helps the child settle into the environment, provides tailored care, tracks progress and builds relationships with parents. This substitute carer appears consistent with the work of James and Joyce Robertson to reduce negative effects of separation.
Onset and duration of day care
Bowlby would advocate for later and less intensive day care for children to allow secure attachment with parents before separation. This is echoed in research by Belsky and Rovine, who found that day care before age one for more than 20 hours weekly resulted in more insecure attachment patterns.
However, the EPPE project and Andersson's research suggests that early onset day care could be both socially and intellectually beneficial for children. The lack of consistent findings is probably explained by the quality of provision, so it is perhaps safer to assume that only good-quality day care is beneficial for children at an early age for full-time working parents.
Key Points to Remember:
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Day care can take many forms, including formal nursery settings and informal care by relatives, with different effects on child development
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Research shows mixed findings: some studies demonstrate positive effects on social and cognitive development (Andersson, EPPE project), whilst others show negative effects on emotional development and behaviour (Belsky & Rovine, NICHD)
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Quality matters: high-quality day care with good staff-to-child ratios, well-trained staff, low turnover and a key person approach produces better outcomes
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Individual differences are important: children with difficult temperaments respond differently to day care quality than other children (Pluess & Belsky)
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Methodological limitations mean day care research is correlational, not causal. Researchers cannot randomise children to different care settings, making it difficult to isolate the true effects of day care from other factors