Is Daycare Contagious?

My kids are all grown now, but way back when the first was born, there was a furious controversy brewing over the risks of putting young children into daycare outside the home. It was a highly personal clash, over fundamental values like self-sacrifice and good parenting. Some mothers (and even a few fathers) actually quit their day jobs and very publicly seized the moral high ground, while those of us with little choice in the matter hoped privately that we were not doing irreparable harm to our toddlers’ emotional well being.

There was very little comforting scientific evidence back then, neither for guilty parents nor for the sanctimonious. But there have been a lot of studies done since, and the results are almost always mixed. It appears that kids who are taken care of by strangers at an earlier age, and remain in their care longer, are indeed more aggressive and disobedient when they finally reach kindergarten. But here’s the rub: Daycare veterans also seem to be better prepared for formal schooling when they finally show up at the schoolhouse door. They have better language and thinking skills on balance.

So, is it a devil’s bargain? Do young parents of today have to choose between their offspring’s academic achievement and their emotional adjustment?

Well, that may be the wrong question as it turns out. A team of psychologists finally thought to ask what may seem like an obvious question: What happens when all the kids, with different early childhood experiences, finally reach school age, and are grouped together in their first kindergarten classes? Do the emotional and academic differences persist? Or do the stay-at-home rugrats take on the traits of their more worldly counterparts? Put another way: Are the consequences of daycare contagious?

Julia Dmitrieva and Laurence Steinberg of Temple University and Jay Belsky of London’s Birkbeck University decided to explore this question scientifically. They studied a huge sample of kindergartners, more than 3400 in almost 300 classrooms, over a year, keeping track of how much they argued and fought with other kids, as well as displays of anger and impulsivity. They also measured their academic competence, in reading and math and so forth.

When the psychologists looked closely at the kids who had logged little or no hours in daycare, the findings were interesting and clear. As reported in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science, by the end of the kindergarten year these kids were basically the same as the kids with lots of daycare experience, for better and worse. That is, they caused just as many problems in the classroom, and they were equally worthy students.

What does this mean? Well, nearly two of every three American children today get some of their care giving from strangers, usually beginning before their first birthday. That means that thousands of classrooms all over the country, and all the children schooled in them, are affected by daycare, no matter what choice a parent makes for his own child. Whether that is a relief or a disappointment probably has more to do with the parent than the child.

For more insights into human nature, visit "We're Only Human . . ."

Wisdom and Wizardry

When Harry Potter first arrives at the Hogwarts school of wizardry, the “sorting hat” is torn about whether to send the boy-wizard to the noble house of Gryffindor or to evil house of Slytherin. Harry wants to follow his noble impulses, but he is wracked by self-doubts over whether he is “truly Gryffindor” or “truly Slytherin.” At a critical moment of soul-searching, Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore counsels Harry: “It is our choices . . . that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

Dumbledore could also be counseling any aging human, says psychologist Elizabeth Stine-Morrow, who borrows from the popular J.K. Rowling books to name her Dumbledore Theory of Cognitive Aging. Like the insecure Harry Potter, Stine-Morrow believes, men and women face a critical choice as they enter old age, a choice between engaging new and different mental challenges—or disengaging and retreating out of fear. According to her model of aging, some losses and declines are inevitable in our later years, but some are not, and still others can be offset by the strengths that come with maturity. The choice is ours.

Stine-Morrow has spent the past several years exploring this theory in her University of Illinois laboratory. Much of her work involves minute and precise measurements of how people, young and old, allocate their brain power as they pursue various cognitive activities. Consider reading, for example. Reading is one of the mental activities that can decline with age, as basic mechanics like word processing and memory slow down. But it doesn’t have to, and Stine-Morrow has shown that sharp elderly readers actually read differently than poor readers. They are much more likely, for example, to create a mental model of a book when they first start reading—getting all the characters straight, the setting clear, and so forth. They also pause more, often mid-sentence, to integrate new information into their understanding of a story.

If these sound like small things, they are. Indeed, these “micro” pauses would not even be noticeable to a casual observer outside the lab, but they are very important indicators of mental function. Basically the people who remain good readers in old age—that is, they comprehend and remember what they’ve read—are making an unconscious choice to compensate for the cognitive losses that come naturally with senescence. They have adopted a habit of mind that is attentive and effortful when it comes to new mental challenges.

Why do some aging men and women choose to allocate their cognitive resources for new learning, while others do not? Why do some step up while others shy away from the challenges of aging? Stine-Morrow suspected that the choice involves more that mere capacity, that the choice to engage is influenced by cultural baggage and beliefs. She decided to test this idea. As described in the December issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science, she had adults of various ages read and remember a text as accurately as possible. You would think that older readers, because they have somewhat diminished capacity, would make a greater effort than younger readers in the task, but this was not the case. Younger readers actually showed keener concentration and enhanced effort. Older readers, regardless of their actual ability, were backing off from the challenge because of their own doubts about the effectiveness of their memory.

Stine-Morrow has some preliminary evidence that older readers can be encouraged to engage in more effortful reading, that they can be taught some of the micro strategies that successful readers seem to find on their own. It is also possible that some elderly men and women choose intellectually rich environments, environments that invite attention and effort, and thus stimulate vitality. This “use it or lose it” debate is longstanding, and Stine-Morrow’s findings will not resolve it now. But they do suggest strongly that raw ability is far less important than intellectual engagement, which sculpts the mind. Or to paraphrase the wisdom that Dumbledore shared with Harry Potter: Our choices in life shape who we truly are.

For more insights into human nature, visit "We're Only Human . . ."