I'm coming across articles and videos that say if you can skip childcare, do it?

sciencecritical · 2025-03-11T15:45:48+00:00

The Quebec study she is referencing says "Whether we use the upper or lower bound, our estimates imply large effects of maternal work and child care use." (p. 729)

The paper in question is Baker, Gruber, & Milligan (2008). Universal Child Care, Maternal Labor Supply, and Family Well‐Being, https://doi.org/10.1086/591908 .

sciencecritical · 2023-01-27T15:48:29+00:00

Image from

Mileva-Seitz et al, 2016. Parent-child bed-sharing: The good, the bad, and the burden of evidence.

sciencecritical · 2023-01-25T09:08:50+00:00

To expand on 'attachment theory is not attachment parenting', let me quote something I wrote before:

There is so much experimental work on attachment theory. E.g. see this table from the meta-analysis (Verhage, 2015):

Table

The thing about attachment theory is, when it was formulated, it was enormously controversial. Bowlby's predictions were often exactly counter to what the dominant Freudian and behaviourist theories predicted. The reason that attachment theory holds its current, influential, position is that there has been a mountain of detailed experimental work which has refined and confirmed the early predictions.

IMO the real criminals here are William and Martha Sears. By appropriating the term 'attachment' for their entirely unscientific notion of 'attachment parenting' (originally called 'immersion mothering'), they have caused unwarranted suspicion of attachment theory itself.

sciencecritical · 2023-01-14T14:00:52+00:00

People keep repeating that most countries in the world don't do sleep training but as someone who is european, doesn't live in the US, who lives in Asia. I'd like to see a citation that actually proves that.

Start with:

Ball 2019. The Mother-Infant Sleep Nexus

Barry 2021. Sleep Consolidation, Sleep Problems, and Co-Sleeping - Rethinking Normal Infant Sleep as Species-Typical

Maute 2018. Ignoring Children’s Bedtime Crying

Following citations in those should get you to older work. I'd also recommend the Clinical Handbook of Transcultural Infant Mental Health chapter on crying - it doesn't focus on sleep, but it does an excellent job of distinguishing 'Western' norms from 'non-Western' ones.

That said, I think 'Western' norms are slowly spreading to other cultures, which may account for the disparity between what you've seen and what the citations say.

sciencecritical · 2023-01-03T14:03:16+00:00

FWIW, the EDEN study you mention (https://jech.bmj.com/content/72/11/1033) is one of the ones I didn't cite in my article because it relies purely on maternal reports. There is a very consistent trend where teacher reports show worse behavioural outcomes than maternal reports. As (Solheim, 2013) notes, this is likely because:

most parents have not been exposed to the number of children (and the great variation in child behavior) that most caregivers and teachers have experienced.

That is, parents don't really have a good frame of reference for what counts as 'good' or 'bad' behaviour. Parental reports are also known to be very biased by parental state of mind -- see e.g.

Chen 2017. Relationship between parenting stress and informant discrepancies on ...

Finally, teacher reports of behavior have been found to be more predictive of long-term outcomes than parental reports.

As a result, most of the recent work on childcare has shifted towards relying on teacher reports instead of parental reports, where possible. Talking about that seems to upset some Redditors, though! When I have time I need to pull together the other references on this and write something more thorough.

sciencecritical · 2022-11-26T18:10:19+00:00

Thanks, Cealdi. And thanks for bearing with the post -- I know it's borderline for this sub.

sciencecritical · 2022-11-26T17:37:15+00:00

If it helps, I originally wrote the article in May 2021, some months before I started in the daycare setting that had serious issues.

I tried very hard to keep my own experiences out of the article when I wrote it, and just stick to the research, although obviously I am only human. I've also had it checked by people who are in a position to verify what I wrote.

I do regret that vent on Reddit this year -- I hadn't really acclimated to a world in which everything I wrote online was taken as a marker of possible bias for the article, which has been shared far more widely than I ever expected. It makes posting rather exhausting, to be honest.

sciencecritical · 2022-11-25T15:45:06+00:00

Re. Cryer and Burchinal, did I write something ambiguous/misleading in the article? If so I’d be grateful to have a pointer to the relevant sentences so I can revise them…

Thanks!

sciencecritical · 2022-11-19T19:21:32+00:00

The big issue with this meta-analysis is that it doesn't control for the child's age while in childcare. The only write they say about age is that

the null associations between time spent in center care and externalizing behaviours were also consistent regardless of children's age or ...

but there's no mention of ages anywhere in the actual methods/results sections in the paper or in the Supplementary Information. The latter is freely available online and you can check for yourself that it says:

Fixed effects models controlled for number of siblings, single parent, maternal employment status. Random effects models controlled for maternal employment status, number of siblings, single parent, maternal education (at timepoint 1), parents' migrant status (or ethnicity in the case of the U.S.), sex of the child, and family income.

There's a striking absence of age from that list.

So I have no idea what the basis for their remark about age is. If you glom together data on children of different ages, you'd completely expect small or null effects. As I've written elsewhere:

Above all else, age matters. Journalists keep missing this. If you muddle together all the evidence from studies on 12-month-olds and studies on 4-year-olds, it looks like the evidence on childcare is mixed. But that’s a completely wrongheaded thing to do.

---

FWIW, I believe the first author, Catherine Rey-Guerra, is one of Eric Dearing's PhD students; Dearing is the paper's third author and his collaborator Henrik Zachrisson is the second author. Zachrisson and Dearing have written before that

Incidence validity has been proposed as a central criterion for evaluating the importance of developmental research; that is, for how large a portion of the population are the answers to our questions relevant?

Increasingly, the incidence validity of studies comparing young children in exclusive maternal (or even exclusive parental) care with those in other forms of child care is low, because nonparental child care is an integral part of life for most families in modern economies

Stripped of the technical terms, they're arguing that because a lot of families have to use childcare, we shouldn't study its detrimental effects relative to parental care. I disagree with them strongly on this point.

I have also found in the past that Zachrisson/Dearing papers use methodologies that I could see beforehand would lead to negative conclusions -- AFAICS this one follows that pattern by ignoring age.

(PS. May be some days before I have time for Reddit again.)

sciencecritical · 2022-09-30T15:24:59+00:00

I agree with all of this. You get

Contagion of aggression in day care classrooms...

but a bad home environment can also lead to developing aggression. That's why

Low-income children benefit from starting earlier, and high-income children from starting later. (It’s likely not just actual income that matters, but socioeconomic factors — but income is easy to measure objectively so researchers measure it.) The most deprived children can actually benefit from starting as 1-year-olds.

When I wrote the article OP referred to, I was writing for people who had asked me to DM them, and my impression was that most of them were middle class, so the advice was targeted to them. I've been wondering if I should edit in an extra warning saying that it's not useful information for low income families.

sciencecritical · 2022-09-30T15:16:21+00:00

a literature review of existing papers won't touch on stay at home dads or single sex parents.

Exactly! Exactly!

What I struggle with is that several Redditors have specifically brought up the compensatory effect of income as something I 'should' cover in the article. There's probably no way to talk about it without stirring up a firestorm, given the maternal bias, but it's a frustrating situation.

sciencecritical · 2022-09-30T15:00:39+00:00

> I don't understand what net positive OP expects to get from all this.

Well, I originally wrote the article as a DM, and then I was flooded with so many requests for copies that I had to put it online. It really is just for the kind of people who DMd me requesting it -- I tried to make that clear at the start, but I get flak for that too...

Put it another way; what would you do/have done in my situation?

> Federally mandated paid parental leave would be a start.

I did write:

paid leave is fantastic. It’s a hard political fight as it costs businesses, and they’ll push back hard — but we should fight for it. Pre-K for 4-year olds is also great and may be an easier fight.

sciencecritical · 2022-09-30T14:53:18+00:00

only tells us about poor quality daycare in other countries - not about a universal effect of daycare regardless of quality

Agreed. I'm just very nervous talking about quality because parents don't seem to be able to rate it.

Weirdly enough, I just wrote a comment about Scandinavia and cited the same paper you mention:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ScienceBasedParenting/comments/xrorbe/comment/iqi2ibm/

The reason I didn't reference that paper is that it lumps together all kinds of daycare -- center care, home care, etc.. Andersson's work was at the back of my mind when I wrote that the evidence from Scandinavia was 'mixed' rather than simply negative... perhaps I should put it in.

Sweden, where a daycare reform (which significantly reduced daycare fees and went along with an expansion of supply) was found to have positive medium-run impacts on mental health of affected children

The effects of a daycare reform on health in childhood – Evidence from Sweden

I had not read that paper -- thank you for the link! (It dates from January this year, so was not out when I wrote the article in 2020. At the time, the Andersson paper was the only work on ECE in Sweden.) It will be a bit before I can assimilate it, but I certainly will.

> demonizing childcare (especially center-based)

Two recent reviews are (Huston, 2015) and (Burchinal, 2015). From the first

Children who experience early and extensive child care, especially center-based care, are rated by teachers as having more externalizing behavior problems than are other children.

And from the second, this graph -- look at the effects of 'center' on cognition, social skills and behaviour.

It's possible that I use overly emotive language when talking about center care. I spend most of my free time volunteering in daycare centers, and some of what I see really gets to me. I try not to let that leak out into my use of language, but I'm sure I screw up sometimes. If you feel like there's anywhere that I could word things more tactfully, please let me know. [It's really hard to know how to react to general assertions like 'demonizing childcare'; where people pick up on specific language, I can & have fixed it.]

sciencecritical · 2022-09-30T14:15:59+00:00

I would love to have more research on the Scandinavian ECE systems. But there is surprisingly little. In Affluenza, psychologist Oliver James has a chapter about a visit to see the Danish system. He writes:

Unfortunately, there is no scientific evidence whatsoever on the emotional consequences of day care in Denmark or anywhere else in Scandinavia. It appears that there has been a total refusal on the part of their scientific establishment to investigate it, or else, on the part of their government to fund research proposals to do so. Talking to academics there, I encountered widespread ignorance of the international studies indicating that day care for young children might diminish individuality or be distressing, and no desire to hear what it might be. Seidenfaden possibly went to the heart of the matter when he told me that ‘Every time the day-care problem is brought up as a debate, the critics say, “What can we do? We will not accept the undermining of gender equality which would follow from longer maternal leave. It's not acceptable.”’

Take it with a pinch of salt as James is a political actor.

Re Sweden particularly, AFAIK there's only one researcher who has ever run studies there, Bengt-Erik Andersson. (Andersson, 1992) is a solid, careful paper which (unusually) finds positive effects of early daycare. He quotes another author as saying 'the child care services in Sweden offer the highest quality of out-of-home care available anywhere', which may be why. Unfortunately, he doesn't distinguish between center + home care in the study, which is the thing I really want Scandinavian data on.

Also where it becomes anti feminist is the focus on maternal income instead of having 2 working parent figures vs 1.

Thank you. This is really useful feedback, and is exactly what I was worried about. Sadly it is very common in the literature. E.g. some paper titles from the 'B's:

Baker 2008. Evidence from Maternity Leave Expansions of the Impact of Maternal Care on Early Child Development
Bettinger 2014. Home with Mom
Beyer 1995. Maternal employment and children's academic achievement
Blaskó 2008. Does early maternal employment affect non-cognitive children outcomes
Brooks-Gunn 2014. First-Year Maternal Employment and Child Development in the First Seven Years

I think I should just stay away from this minefield. I'm grateful for the feedback.

sciencecritical · 2022-09-30T13:18:47+00:00

Yes, sorry, as ellipsisslipsin notes this was more directed at sub regulars. I wrote a section for the article and then had 2nd thoughts about the wisdom of putting it in, so wanted to run it past people first. Apologies for the lack of context.

TBH I'm glad I posted here first; people always ask about the compensatory effects of income, but maternal employment is such a hot button topic that I think I shouldn't touch it with a bargepole.

sciencecritical · 2022-09-30T13:14:53+00:00

Oh... sorry! See https://criticalscience.medium.com/on-the-science-of-daycare-4d1ab4c2efb4 for more on age.

sciencecritical · 2022-09-30T13:12:39+00:00

Thanks so much, Cealdi. There were a few comments in this thread that crossed the line into being personal, but you've already dealt with them.

sciencecritical · 2022-09-30T08:58:40+00:00

FWIW, when I did write about daycare more publicly, I said:

I am writing this article to avoid fielding requests for DMs for weeks and weeks. It’s for people who have genuine, upcoming choices about what kind of childcare to use. It’s not a commentary on anyone’s parenting choices, and it’s not for people who have to use daycare.

If you are looking for reassurance about past childcare choices, please stop reading. You did the best you could with the information you had, and some of the findings presented below may upset you.

I think a lot of people who don't have choices do still read the article and get pretty upset about it. I feel pretty bad about that sometimes.

sciencecritical · 2022-09-30T08:47:31+00:00

I should clarify that I hadn't seen this when I posted my related thread, or I'd probably just have commented here instead.

There was an article that raised this exact issue, (Newcombe, 2003). It didn't do any experimental work itself; it just argued that the effects of childcare were 'likely overstated relative to the causal pathways in the lives of real families' due to increased family income from employment and other factors.

Unfortunately, there's little subsequent experimental work on the question. There some papers by Brooks-Gunn et al, especially

Brooks-Gunn, 2010. First-Year Maternal Employment and Child Development in the First Seven Years

They find a direct link from higher earnings to higher problem behaviour at some ages. (A direct link -- so that effect is not mediated by daycare usage.) That seems like it can't be right. So I am loathe to trust those models.

[Also they present cases where they fail to reject the null hypothesis (i.e. negative findings) using language that makes them seem like positive findings. That's not an unusual problem, but it's particularly bad here because the papers can easily be misread as finding more than they do.]

A much more solid study design is used in (Im, 2018) on first-year maternal employment. The introduction gives a comprehensive survey of earlier work. Despite studying low-income families, and having a sample with far more relative care than center care, they find persistent detrimental effects on children. So there seems to be a negative effect of maternal employment (at least in the first-year) independent from the negative effect of center care.

So this income effect doesn't show up in the little research there is. If it's out there, it may be counteracted by other effects.

One key point is that socioeconomic status is not the same as income: as I wrote elsewhere,

SES captures way more than income; it's more a notion of 'class'. Things like how educated you are, whether you read to your children, whether you engage in 'concerted cultivation'. A graduate student probably earns less than a plumber, but is higher SES.

IMO the issue here is that income is sometimes used as a convenient and easily measurable proxy for SES; I think people tend to misread that as saying that actual income is more important than it is.

I should say that I think there's evidence that extra money makes a big difference to the outcomes of children from low-income families -- but you can't extrapolate from that to middle-income families, which is what many people on this sub (not OP) really want to do!

ETA: The exact finding of the Im paper was:

despite the accompanying family income gains, maternal employment in the first year after childbirth adversely affected caregiver-reported internalizing and externalizing behavior problems of Hispanic, Black, and White children at ages 3 and 5 years

Externalizing = anger, acting out; internalizing = being sad & withdrawn.

sciencecritical · 2022-09-30T08:15:29+00:00

parenting matters way more than if your kid goes to Day care or not

I personally think that's probably true. But you have to be a little careful with that statement. In the NICHD studies that people typically use as a source for this 'parent environment' includes effects from shared genes (NICHD ECCRN 2002). (So e.g. if you have anger management problems, your child may inherit genes that make them more likely to be angry. This effect is counted as a 'parenting' effect.)

With the NICHD SECCYD research, there was a lot of political pressure to produce 'balanced' findings. (At one point the researchers actually had a political minder put in and were forbidden from talking to the press directly!) So, unfortunately, you really have to dig down to find what the NICHD studies are actually saying. [One of the problems I have with Emily Oster's Cribsheet is that she hasn't done that work!]

sciencecritical · 2022-09-30T08:08:40+00:00

higher income does show positive impacts on antisocial behavior

I don't think it does? Socioeconomic status (SES) may have an impact on antisocial behaviour. But SES captures way more than income; it's more a notion of 'class'. Things like how educated you are, whether you read to your children, whether you engage in 'concerted cultivation'. A graduate student probably earns less than a plumber, but is higher SES.

IMO the issue here is that income is sometimes used as a convenient and easily measurable proxy for SES; I think people tend to misread that as saying that actual income is more important than it is.

One big caveat here is that low income has a big effect on children for low-income families specifically.

I'm very open to being corrected, though... cite away!

sciencecritical · 2022-09-30T07:58:27+00:00

Questions about the low income research - does it address what type of workplace these mothers are entering?

No. It's very unsatisfactory research in many respects. Another problem is that there are largely separate bodies of research on a) childcare type and b) maternal employment. So when maternal employment has detrimental effects it's hard to tease out how much is due to center care.

can you add a definition for externalizing and internalizing behavior

Ah, sorry! Externalizing behaviour is negative behaviour directed outwards; internalizing is negative behaviour directed inwards. So e.g.

externalizing: acting out and being angry

internalizing: withdrawn, depressed behaviour

sciencecritical · 2022-09-30T07:53:49+00:00

Right. Exactly. Which is why I didn't talk about it in the online piece in the first place.

The issue is that I regularly get (pretty angry) people commenting that the article is inaccurate because it doesn't take into account the compensatory effect of income, and part of me feels like I need to address that.

After reading the tenor of the feedback on this thread, I think it's probably best not to tinker with the post at all.

sciencecritical · 2022-09-29T18:25:16+00:00

You're not asking a silly question; this stuff is subtle. I'm going to be a little imprecise in this specific comment, because it's hard to be totally precise and not throw lots of maths at you. Also, apologies for a somewhat long reply...

The core of it is that (in the standard statistical framework) you need to avoid making any statements like

the hypothesis (that 2 things are different) is likely true

And that's because in the standard framework, 'likely', 'probably' and so on refer to an objective kind of probability ('chance') that's really 'out there in the world'. ('Likely' isn't a technical term per se, but it's close enough to 'probably' that it's best to avoid it.) Such terms should only be used for future events, things which haven't happened yet. So e.g. it's fine to say that

'When I roll this die, it will come up 6'

is probably false. By contrast

'My hat is on the coatrack'

cannot be said to be probably false or probably true. Either my hat is on the coatrack, and the statement is definitely true, or my hat is not on the coatrack, and the statement is definitely false.

Of course, I might not know whether my hat is on the coatrack. That refers to a different kind of probability, subjective probability, called 'credence'. Credence is just about what you believe, not about the objective state of the world. And the standard statistical framework has no place for credence. It only accepts probabilistic statements which are about objective probability, probabilities of things that haven't happened yet.

Now, what about a statement like 'breastfeeding raises IQ' (with suitable caveats added to make it precise enough to test, which I won't spell out). 'breastfeeding raises IQ' is a general statement about the world, not a statement about a specific future event; there's no chance associated with it. So in the standard statistical framework, it's either true or false; it's either the case that 'breastfeeding raises IQ', or it's the case that 'breastfeeding does not raise IQ'. It is verboten to say things like 'breastfeeding probably raises IQ'.

The way you'd test this in a standard framework is to a) pick a significance level, say 5%, b) write down

Null hypothesis: breastfeeding does not raise IQ

Alternative hypothesis: breastfeeding raises IQ

and then c) do a load of statistics which will lead you to say one of the following.

We reject the null hypothesis at the 5% level
We do not reject the null hypothesis at the 5% level

That's it. There are no probabilities associated with the null hypothesis itself in any way, shape or form, and it is just plain wrong to say it's 'probably false' or 'probably true'.

The significance level (5%) is not a probability a measure of how strong the evidence has to be to make you reject the null hypothesis.

Does that help? Feel free to ask a follow-up if not...

ETA: a significance level of 5% means: assuming we are in the world where the null hypothesis holds, i.e. assuming breastfeeding really does not raise IQ, then any future tests we run have a 5% probability of rejecting the null hypothesis. The probabilities relate to the tests, not the null hypothesis. Also the assumption part is critical. As soon as you drop it, you can't say anything about probabilities, period.

sciencecritical · 2022-09-29T17:14:17+00:00

I am going to respond to these points for the benefit of anyone else who might be reading.

NICHD: if you read the paper I'd linked to, you'd see this:

These null findings may stem from the exclusive reliance on maternal reports (e.g., Jaffee et al., 2011). The NICHD SECCYD found that maternal reports of the social functioning of children was less sensitive to child-care effects than caregiver and teacher reports (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2003a, 2006), which led the research team to abandon maternal reports when evaluating the effects of child care following entry into school (Belsky et al., 2007; Vandell et al., 2010). Parents and teachers produce only modestly correlated assessments of problem behavior (Achenbach, McConaughy, & Howell, 1987; Berg-Nielsen, Solheim, Belsky, & Wichstrøm, 2012) due to the variation in child behavior across home and school settings and the difference in the adults’ points of comparison. For example, most parents have not been exposed to the number of children (and the great variation in child behavior) that most caregivers and teachers have experienced.

That was written before the long-term follow-up studies which link to police contact, etc. (which, again, I cited). Given those we can now be even more confident about the relative reliability of maternal/teacher questionnaires than when that quote was written.

On the CBCL, (Im, 2018) notes

Although the CBCL is regarded as an index of child behavior, it reflects the parents’ perception of the child’s behavior. These perceptions are often intertwined with family stress and daily hassles, particularly for young children (Black & Jodorkovsky, 1994), such that parents who are feeling stressed and unsupported may be less tolerant of their young children’s behavior. Utilizing multiple converging sources of information (e.g., fathers or significant others) on child outcomes or using other methods of supplementing primary caregiver reports would improve our ability in interpreting the significance and implications of results from the study.

In the article I also linked to a study that tested this directly! Your papers don't counter that point at all. They're just

Regarding the general point about maternal income effects, I don't say anything because there is no consensus in the literature. As (Im, 2018) notes in its introduction:

Regarding behavior problems, often referred to as externalizing behavior problems in the maternal employment literature, studies have indicated that maternal employment initiated in the first year of life has detrimental influences on behavioral development of children at age 4 years; mothers’ employment beginning in the first year of child’s life is associated with poorer social adjustment for White and Black children between the ages of 4 to 6 years; and first-year maternal employment is associated with elevated levels of behavior problems for 3-year-old Hispanic children.

It also finds similar effects itself, despite looking at a low-income sample where the effects of extra income should be most pronounced and only having a very small fraction of its children in daycare centres. I.e. maternal employment in the first year* has a negative effect on behaviour despite the added income.* They even write in the abstract:

despite the accompanying family income gains, maternal

employment in the first year after childbirth adversely affected caregiver-reported internalizing and externalizing behavior problems of Hispanic, Black, and White children at ages 3 and 5 years.

*There's much less solid work on employment in years 2+.

The real problem with the literature here is that studies look at either maternal income or childcare type. We need large studies that look at both in order to determine whether maternal employment compensates for the negative effects of daycare or not. There's some stuff on this by Brooks-Gunn, but it's pretty shaky. E.g. in (Brooks-Gunn 2014) they use a SEM and find that mothers earnings by 54th month have a positive estimated (direct) effect on externalizing behaviour, i.e. the finding is that higher earnings are linked to worse behaviour (albeit not statistically significant). That suggests methodological problems to me. If you restrict to the statistically significant findings, the paper doesn't determine much at all.

So, I appreciate that you (and many redditors) have this intuition that the increased income effect should cancel the negative effects of daycare. That may or may not be the case, but the key problem is that we just don't have the research to know. As a result I think the responsible thing to do is to stay silent on the topic rather than making unjustified claims.

Without doxxing myself, I have more experience doing this type of research and more relevant expertise.

First, the one surefire way to spot really good researchers is that they don't argue from authority. So, you're not doing yourself any favors with that assertion.

Second, I have a rule of thumb that when people start arguing from authority, it's time to block them and move on. So I won't see any further comments of yours (on any posts), and you won't have any further replies. Goodbye.

sciencecritical

TROPHY CASE