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Study Calms Debate: What's Best for the Children |
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Study Calms Debate: What's Best for the Children
By LEIGH BELL World Staff Writer
4/3/2007
Parenting, not day care, determines child's success
Mothers these days find themselves in two camps: those who work, and
those who don't.
They also find themselves arguing over what's best for their children.
Stacy Strow tends to think that her children learn important social
skills and conflict resolution in day care.
Strow, 38, has her two youngest children in an all-day early childhood
program while she works as the principal of Eisenhower International
School.
Denise Magnuson, 43, believes that staying home with her children gives
them security and family experiences that they might not have otherwise.
Chances are, the children of both Tulsa families will turn out OK. They
have caring, invested parents.
And it's parenting skills, not day care, that truly decides a child's
outcome, according the findings of a recent study that quiets the fiery
debate over child care.
"Parenting quality was a much more important predictor of child
development than was type, quantity or quality of child care," according
to the study, funded by the National Institutes of Health.
It is the largest, longest, most-comprehensive study conducted on child
care in the United States.
Recent media reports of the study have highlighted a few differences --
positive and negative -- between grade-school children who were placed
in child care and those who were not.
Parents shouldn't pay it much mind because the differences are so
slight, said James Griffin, the study's Science Officer for the National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
"We didn't find an exclusive advantage to one-parent, in-home child
care," but we "didn't find a distinct disadvantage to it, either," he
said.
The study shows that children who attended high-quality child care had
better vocabulary skills by the fifth grade than their peers did.
Yet by sixth grade, the study found, the more time children spent in
center-based child care before kindergarten, the more likely their
teachers were to report behavior problems.
Strow can't read the future for her children and how it will be affected
by day care, but she knows what she sees among her students at
Eisenhower.
"There is no way I could go into a fifth-grade class and say that child
must have been in day care and that one must have stayed home," she
said.
Some 165 children ages 6 weeks to 5 years attend childhood education
programs at the YWCA, a highly rated program that stresses early
learning.
But Anita Carwile, the director of child and youth development, said
little the instructors teach will stick with children if it's not
reinforced at home.
"Child care is a difficult choice for parents to make because you just
feel like you can provide the best care for your kids," she said.
"Parents ultimately are crucial. You can't have it any other way.
Parents are the No. 1 teacher for their kids."
The Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development followed 1,364
children and what kind of care they received from birth to age 4 1/2.
Then researchers evaluated the children from kindergarten through fifth
grade on achievement and intellectual ability, as well as through sixth
grade on social development.
Researchers found that the correlation between high-quality child care
and better vocabulary didn't depend on how long the child spent in child
care.
Inversely, the more time a youngster spent in child care, the more
frequently he or she showed problem behavior.
Paige Whalen, the quality enhancement initiative coordinator at the
Child Care Resource Center in Tulsa, pointed out some weaknesses in the
study, including that the sample of children was not representative of
all U.S. youngsters and the lack of accounting for a child's
environmental and developmental changes from the fifth to the sixth
grades.
"It is not a definitive answer as to why children do what they do," she
said.
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