Contrary to earlier studies a new study has found that there is no direct link between the amount of time a child spends at a daycare and behavioral problems
Earlier studies have proved that the more amount of time a child spends at the daycare; more chances of that child having behavioral problems arise. However, a new study conducted by researchers from the United States and Norway suggests that this is not entirely true.
"In Norway, we do not find that children who spend a significant amount of time in child care have more behavior problems than other children," Boston College Associate Professor of Education Eric Dearing, a co-author of the report, said. "This runs counter to several US studies that have shown a correlation between time in child care and behavior problems."
Dearing says the way Norway looks at child care could be an influencing factor that led to the finding. In the Scandinavian country, employed parents usually have leave policies such that doesn't require them to leave their child at any day care until they are one year old.
"Norway takes a very different approach to child care than we do in the United States and that may play a role in our findings," said Dearing, an expert in child development, who co-authored the study with Dr. Claudio O. Toppelberg, a psychiatrist and researcher with Harvard Medical School and its Judge Baker Children's Center, and Norwegian researchers Henrik D. Zachrisson and Ratib Lekhal.
Dearing and his team of researchers went through a number of statistical tests to examine methods used in earlier U.S. studies to compare them to their own findings.
"The biggest surprise was that we found so little evidence of a relation between child care hours and behavior once we introduced conservative controls in an effort to ensure that any association was in fact causal," said Dearing. "With such a very large sample, even very, very small correlations would be statistically significant. But we found no association in our most sophisticated models."
The report was published in the online version of the journal Child Development.
