The headline on the Times story sounds pretty ominous: Poor Behavior Is Linked to Time in Day Care. The first paragraph hypes the dangers even more:
A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade.
Wow. I’m imagining 6-year-old gang-bangers busting a cap in their teachers’ head. But then I read the second paragraph:
The effect was slight, and well within the normal range for healthy children, the researchers found. And as expected, parents’ guidance and their genes had by far the strongest influence on how children behaved.
Ohhh-kay. I thought we knew all this. Further clarification from the study’s author sheds even more light on the frightening headlines:
I’m not sure we communicated this, but the kids who had one to two years of daycare by age 4½—which was typical for our sample—had exactly the level of problem behavior you’d expect for kids of their age. Most people use center care for one or two years, and for those kids we’re not seeing anything problematic.
In other words, unless you’re dropping your kids off at daycare on the way home from the delivery room, they’ll probably turn out OK.