Study Links...
Interestingly enough, the last two weeks, we've been doing lessons on topics having direct relevance to this report, Study Links Child Care to Acting Out, in the Boston Globe.
Here are some excerpts from that story, not in order of appearance but in the order which makes the most sense here.
In the study, child care was defined as care by anyone other than the child's mother who was regularly scheduled for at least 10 hours per week.
Wow. That's kind of sexist. Ah well. It's something to look up in the article before I get too riled up. Could be the Globe has a skewed reporting of it. Especially considering the next set of statements.
Youngsters who had quality child care before kindergarten had better vocabulary scores by fifth grade, but the more time they spent in child care, the more likely their sixth grade teachers were to report problem behaviors.
(however...)
The authors emphasized that the children's behavior was within a normal range and that it would be impossible to go into a classroom, and with no additional information, pick out those who had been in child care.
Ok, so the authors emphasized that the daycared children were impossible to distinguish from the non-daycared children by simply observing them, and that (presumably) even using whatever testing they used (um...teacher reporting?) the behavior of the daycared for children was within the limits of normal behavior.
But the Globe's headline is STUDY LINKS CHILDCARE TO ACTING OUT. Does it sound like they perhaps are overinterpreting this study's findings?
Maybe we should offer a class called "Don't Believe Everything You Read".
2 comments:
You can read the research article here:
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/cdev/78/2
(It's the last one in the list.)
The predictive relationship is pretty small. Also, since it's unethical to do this kind of study as an experiment with random assignment to condition, people self-selected toward center care or home care. There are lots of reasons why people selecting center care might have kids at risk for behavior problems -- for instance, if you live in a dangerous area, center care may seem safer than home care. So it's not the center care that's producing the problem behavior, but a problem environment.
Now I have to read the article in its entirety. I have a subscription to Child Development but hadn't looked at this one yet... thanks for adding one more reading to my weekly load! ;-)
I went and looked it over briefly too (access is only available if you're on through a university with a subscription or have one yourself). Saved a copy to my hard drive too because I anticipate some of my students might come back with the news article as part of this week's HW assignment. Extra credit was to look for "science" in the news and offer a critical reading of the article. Weeee. This should be fun.
Doncha love that the statement by the researchers is diminished so much as to allow headlines of the sort "child care linked to problem behavior"? Also, how come they don't have to give the authors' names in the AP write up?
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