081: How can I decide which daycare/preschool is right for my child?

I regularly receive questions from listeners asking me whether they should put their child in daycare or preschool and my response has typically been that there isn’t a lot of research on the benefits and drawbacks for middle class children on whether or not the child goes to daycare/preschool, and that is still true.  I’ve done research on my listeners and while parents of all types listen to the show, the majority of you are fortunate enough to not be highly economically challenged. So in this episode we’ll talk about why preschool is considered to be such a good thing for children of lower-income families, and also what research is available on the effects – both positive and negative – of daycare and preschool on children of middle- and upper-income families. You’ll also hear me mention in the show that it’s really, really difficult even for researchers to accurately measure the quality of a daycare/preschool setting because you can’t just get data on child:teacher ratios and teacher qualifications to do this.  You have to actually visit the setting and understand the experience of the children to do this – but what do you look for?  And what questions do you ask?  In the show I mention a list of questions you can ask the staff and things you can look out for that Evelyn Nichols, M.Ed of Mighty Bambinis and I put together – Click here to download. Let me know (in the comments below) if you have follow-up questions as you think through this decision for your family!   Read Full Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we’re covering an altruistic episode – one that I don’t need, because we already made this decision a long time ago – and that’s on how to decide whether you should put your child in daycare or preschool. I regularly get questions from listeners on this and my response has typically been that there isn’t a lot of research on the benefits and drawbacks for middle class children on whether or not the child goes to daycare, and that is still true. I’m going to be really up-front here and say that the vast majority of the literature related to childcare is conducted from the perspective of looking at methods to close the enormous deficit in skills – particularly language skills – with which poor children, and particularly poor Black children, enter kindergarten. Yet very, very few of these researchers ever think to question the system in which this research, and the poor children themselves, reside – these children only have a “deficit” of skills because the school system isn’t set up to value and develop the skills these children DO bring. So the vast majority of this research says something along the lines of “poor children have X, Y, and Z skills when they enter daycare, and daycare has success at closing the X gap between poor children and middle class children but not Y and Z.” Now I’ve done research on the listeners of this show and while there are certainly parents of all kinds listening, I think my listeners – and certainly the people who email me asking about daycare – are mostly fortunate enough to not be highly economically challenged. Many of them have been stay-at-home parents for several years and are trying to decide whether the child would benefit more from continuing to stay home or go to daycare, rather than making this decision from the perspective of “our family needs another income so my child is going to have to go to daycare,” although there are a few who worry about whether they are somehow being selfish for wanting to work and sending their child to daycare. So we should acknowledge that the concerns of parents who are asking me about daycare and preschool for their children are pretty different from those of most of the researchers who look at this question. But there are some researchers who have taken a different perspective, or who have looked at the data in such a way that allows us to understand more about how this decision affects our children, so today we’re going to look at the what the scientific literature says on this topic. We’ll look at whatever research is available in the pre-kindergarten years, so throughout this episode when I say “daycare” I mean care for infants, and when I say “preschool” I mean care for toddlers and up, and I’ll let you know the age group that the studies refer to. And I have a couple of other treats lined up for you as well. If you’re in the U.S. and possibly some other Western countries as well you may be gearing up for preschool touring season so my friend Evelyn Nichols, who used to run the RIE- and Reggio Emillia-inspired daycare Mighty Bambinis, has written a blog post for us drawing on her expertise running a daycare as well as her Masters in Education to help us understand what questions we should REALLY be asking on a preschool tour to get a feel for whether a preschool is going to be a good fit for your family. That post will be out next week, but if you want to get a headstart (or you have tours coming up this week!) head on over to yourparentingmojo.com/preschool to download a really cool printable list of questions to take on a preschool tour with space for you to jot down your answers. That printable is available right now, and if you’ve subscribed to the show through my website then you actually received it in the same email I used to let you know that this show is live. If you’re not subscribed through my site then head on over to yourparentingmojo.com/preschool to download the printable to take with you on your tours, because it’s going to let you know the kinds of questions to ask and things to look out for that will help you to judge the real quality of a care setting, which the literature shows is not as easy to judge as you might imagine. OK, now into the research. I want to lay just a little bit of groundwork with research on the effects of daycare in infancy, even though that isn’t our focus. A lot of the studies looking at daycare and preschool takes advantage of policy changes related to parental leave in European countries, and looks at shift in children’s abilities before and after the change. And as a little methodological side note, these studies are done in a pretty different way from the usual ones we see on the show where a researcher takes 50 children into a lab and asks 25 of them to do one kind of task and the other 25 just play a game and the researchers ask both groups to do a different task and see which children can do it better. For many of these studies the researcher calls up, for example, Statistics Norway and says “could you please send me the data you have on the percentage of mothers that worked the year before and after the maternity leave increase, as well as the test scores for all five-year-old students in the country in those years, and also the final graduation rates and test scores for those children when they left school?” and Statistics Norway says “certainly Madam; we’ll send it to you within a couple of weeks” and the researcher can just sit in their office and run some statistical analysis on the data. So this data can give us some incredibly powerful country-level information that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to gather by an individual researcher. But we should also acknowledge that this data isn’t able to tell us much about the individual-level processes going on. A child might score poorly or well on a standardized test for a host of reasons not related to the amount of time they spent in daycare or preschool, so while these studies can tell us about how children *on average* respond to being in daycare or preschool, they don’t tell us much about how YOUR CHILD will respond to this. So one study on infant care compared child outcomes after an increase in mandatory paid maternity leave from 0 to 4 months, and mandatory unpaid maternity leave from 3 to 12 months in Norway in 1977. These children were 29 in 2006 when the study happened, and the study found that 2.7% more of the children completed high school after the reform, going up to 5.2% for those whose mothers have less than 10 years of education. There wasn’t really any high quality childcare available in Norway for under two-year-olds at the time, so the alternative was grandparents or other informal care, so this isn’t really a comparison between the kinds of care that most of my listeners are considering. An American study found that children whose mothers worked during the first year had lower scores on a test of cognitive ability and verbal intelligence, but this was potentially offset by a positive effect when the mother works in the second and subsequent years. The negative first year effect wasn’t impacted by the increased maternal income that came with the mother’s work, although this did appear to play an important role in producing the positive effect in the second and later years, but this study didn’t look at the kind of care the mother was using so we don’t know if it was center-based or informal (which is a pretty important distinction, as informal care is regularly associated with detrimental outcomes for children), and we also don’t know anything whether these differences between the two groups persisted as the children got older. Another American study aimed to control for factors that might have differed between families using daycare and families not using daycare - so things like the fact that women who return to work earlier may provide a less nurturing or stimulating home environment and be less likely to breast...