Daycare centers have been most often a place where children get their first experience of a school environment. It is where infant/toddler class will encourage the children to explore and discover his or her world daily. Most programs in daycare facilities are accented with the use of sensory activities and language development (children will learn by “doing”). Also, the teacher should also provide the parent with a weekly goal, in keeping with the learning environment. Parents can always welcome to take part in classroom activities and share ideas with teachers. With 53 percent of all mothers were working in the 1990s, daycare facilities were one of the most essential human services needed by all families. In this regard, the study of Caldwell (1993) entitled “Impact of Day Care on the Child” takes on an objective stance in assessing the cognitive and socio-emotional effects of daycare centers on children who experienced being in the facility. With her research, Caldwell was able to come up with three suggestions in improving the standards of daycare facilities:
- strengthening the knowledge base,
- reconceptualizing the service,
- making a commitment to quality.
Since the paper is discussing the impacts of daycare facilities on young children, the author assumed that much of the people interested in her topic would be teachers and parents. Clearly, Caldwell’s article dealt with the “nurture” part of childhood development because daycare facilities were created to prepare children in a school environment later on in their lives. Caldwell (1993) reasoned out that her intention is to provide more information for research on the effects of daycare. Most studies in this field run in “the risk of oversimplification” where most of “these reviews were that the child care experience need not harm children and, for those whose home environments were understimulating and over stressful”. Because of the wide-ranging scope of literature on daycare studies, Caldwell chose to concentrate on two topics – namely the impact of daycare on cognitive and socioemotional development. In her discussion of the literature that dealt with the cognitive effects, Caldwell found that one of the first daycare centers in America located in Syracuse, New York gave “evidence of cognitive gains associated with day-care participation, with the more deprived children showing the greatest gains”. In achieving this, the studies showed evidence that “the attachment to the mother need not be impaired” and “that children whose early years included daycare showed no more signs of emotional maladjustment than did children without this experience”. However, these early studies showed “shaky” generalizations. Regardless, “these early projects offered reassurance to other professionals and to parents about what would happen to children under these conditions and helped identify parameters of risk and benefit that have guided subsequent programs and research in the field”. More scientific studies later compared controlled assessments of the children with full daycare experience to those without it. In the full-day care, the children were around 6 weeks of age were exposed to a program that “focused on language development, general cognitive enrichment, and adaptive social behavior consistent IQ differences in favor of the experimental children throughout early childhood”. The comparison gathered consistent IQ differences within the two groups favoring the children in the full-day care program.
With regards to the socioemotional development, Caldwell informed that “greatest worry has been that such an experience (daycare) would weaken the children’s attachment to their own mothers”. However, this fear was proven wrong ever since the Syracuse project that found “no significant differences were found between the groups in a cluster of behaviors defined as representing attachment”. Later studies revealed that the “debate about attachment and daycare is purely semantic”, this because Caldwell thought that “there is a tendency for critics to use expressions such as, “Children who participate in daycare are less securely attached to their mothers”, yet this is was “not at all what has been shown”. Caldwell defended that although “the research has shown little or nothing about ‘how securely’ any infants are attached”, the differences of this attachment studies were all not too significant to warrant a conclusion that children with daycare experiences would become emotionally distant to their mothers or parents.
With all her assertions, Caldwell cited many scientific studies to prove her point and strengthen her suggestions. This is the reason why Caldwell offered that more research in this area is needed because although the “knowledge base is growing rapidly, the conceptual structure that supports it is flimsy and insubstantial”. Caldwell’s article is very informative because she explained the impacts of daycare by focusing on two specific topics only, rather than touching on everything without salient discussions on each. Obviously, she knows the cognitive and socioemotional impacts of daycare quite well and she adeptly explained all of her assertions with accompanying results from the literature she provided. With her observations, she was able to suggest: 1.) strengthening the knowledge base, 2.) reconceptualizing the service, and 3.) making a commitment to quality. Thus, this study will be of great help to parents and teachers alike, for them to understand more on the impacts of enrolling their young children in daycare facilities. This will also serve as a guide for future researchers, where they can expand by studying the success of implementing the three suggestions she had made.
References
Caldwell, B. (1993). Impact of Day Care on the Child. Pediatrics, 91, 225–228.