Day-care won’t make your toddler aggressive

“From a public perspective, our findings are important because they should help ease parents’ fears about the potential harms of early non-parental child care,” said study lead author Eric Dearing, psychological scientist at Lynch School of Education, Boston College in the US.

As women entered the workforce in increasing numbers in the 1980s, some child development researchers began reporting that day-care had harmful consequences for children’s social and emotional adjustment. These findings stoked uncertainty and fear among <g data-gr-id="25">parents,</g> and led to <g data-gr-id="24">debate</g> amongst researchers in the field.

In this study, researchers interviewed parents of almost 1,000 Norwegian children about time spent in day-care at ages six months and one, two, three, and four years old. Each year, the child’s daycare teacher reported on aggressive behaviours like hitting, pushing, and biting.

“One surprising finding was that the longer children were in non-parental care, the smaller the effects on aggression became,” Dearing explained.

When the children were two years old, those who had entered day care at earlier ages displayed modestly higher levels of aggression than peers who entered later.  Importantly, these differences in physical aggression diminished over time, regardless of how much time children spent in <g data-gr-id="23">day-care</g>.

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science.