Is Expanding Publicly Funded Childcare in the Best Interests of Children?
By Katharine B. Stevens
BLOG
April 4, 2023
A few weeks ago, I was honored to speak at a meeting of the NGO Committee on the Family–New York at the United Nations for an event entitled “Sons and Daughters of Working Mothers: Successes and Challenges.” The session addressed the growing push for publicly funded childcare as essential to enable women to pursue their careers, increase family earnings, and boost national economies.
Women’s careers, family earnings, and GDP are clearly of great importance. But as I argue in my presentation, the question of childcare is fundamentally about with whom and in what environments young children spend the first years of their lives. That means the core question in this policy area must be: “Will expanding childcare be good for children?” And advancing the well-being of children must be our primary policy goal.
You can see my full presentation here. Key points include:
Researchers have found both positive and negative impacts of high-quality childcare.
Some studies have found positive effects of high-quality group care on young children. Yet other research has found negative effects of even high-quality care. Furthermore, whether positive or negative, it’s crucial to remember that study findings don’t tell us about effects on specific children. Rather, these findings describe average effects across large groups, obscuring heterogeneous effects across subgroups of children. So, while findings of adverse effects do not mean that childcare harms all children, findings of positive or neutral effects neither “prove” that high-quality childcare is always harmless.
Early and extensive care is a particular cause for concern.
Researchers remain worried that long hours in group care may have especially adverse effects on infants and toddlers. Indeed, the largest study to date on this question, by the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD), found that extensive hours in nonparental, group care during infancy and toddlerhood predicted negative social-emotional outcomes from preschool into adolescence. But beyond the NICHD study, very little research has been done on childcare's effects on infants and toddlers specifically, even though we know their developmental needs are critically different than those of preschoolers and older children.
In 2020, several researchers published an article in Epigenomics describing the serious conflict between a growing body of developmental science and an increasingly widespread use of childcare for children under age three — a conflict that remains unexamined, they argue, because of a “taboo on open debate”:
We have identified around 1000 research reports, in different sciences spread over 30 years, that separating small children from their mothers has a variety of adverse effects. However, we have not identified a systematic review in any leading general medical journal and as far as we know, this is the first editorial on this topic.
Childcare increases parental workforce participation by decreasing children’s time at home.
What causes widely observed heterogeneity in childcare’s effects? Researchers suggest that variation in impact is driven by the quality of children’s home environments. That is, the effects of childcare depend both on its quality and the quality of what it's replacing. Children from unstable home environments can benefit from attending high-quality childcare. But even high-quality programs have an adverse effect on children when they displace or diminish higher quality home care.
The bottom line is that for many young children the optimal early learning environment is simply their own home. Research is clear that children are “hardwired” to develop within a small group of familiar, loving people and require consistent, stable, one-on-one nurturing relationships to develop well. Indeed, for most of human history, children’s first years of development occurred at home, usually with full-time maternal care. As Professor James Heckman has observed:
The “intervention” that a loving, resourceful family gives to its children has huge benefits that, unfortunately, have never been measured well. Public preschool programs can potentially compensate for the home environments of disadvantaged children. No public preschool program can provide the environment and the parental love and care of a functioning family and the lifetime benefits that ensue.
High-quality childcare has significant benefits for low socioeconomic status (SES) children, particularly from single-parent households — the very children with the very least access to high quality care. Boosting access to high-quality childcare for low SES children is an important policy goal that merits substantially increased public funding.
But the available evidence from both childcare research and developmental science tells us that a large, non-targeted expansion of publicly funded childcare will not be in the best interests of young children overall.
See Also
Podcast ~ May 27, 2020
Article ~ April 27, 2021
Blog ~ November 30, 2022