Balancing family, work Day-care study raises questions, and anxious moms need answers By Marilyn Elias

USA TODAY

The public uproar over a new study linking early day care to aggression in kindergarten doesn't surprise psychologist Laraine Zappert.

Moms of today's preschoolers ''are, if anything, even a little more ambivalent'' about combining career and family than trailblazing baby-boomer mothers, says Zappert, of Stanford University Medical School.

There's an entire chapter on guilt and how to cope with it in her new book, Getting It Right: How Working Mothers Successfully Take Up the Challenge of Life, Family and Career ($25.95, Pocket Books). It offers nitty-gritty strategies for how to do the job/family dance.

''Women are so very anxious about their children and how to make this work,'' Zappert says. Dads definitely are doing more, ''but women still take psychological responsibility for the family.''

About two out of three U.S. mothers with preschoolers are employed. Their anxiety could hardly be eased, says Zappert, by hearing a couple of weeks ago that as hours in day care rise, so do behavior problems in kindergarten -- a key finding of the federal study of 1,364 children starting in early infancy.

Still, the research on these kids is far from over, and kindergarten is not life, study scientists emphasize.

Despite concern over the new findings, many urgent questions that parents have cannot be answered by the study so far. Others that can be answered do offer some reassurance to working parents, says study director Sarah Friedman of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

Among major questions posed by parents:

* What exactly are these behavior problems, and how serious are they?

Some 41 separate behaviors on a check list are called ''aggressive,'' and their seriousness varies. The items range from ''easily jealous'' and ''bragging'' to ''physically attacks people'' and ''cruelty.''

Kindergarten teachers rated 17% of kids in preschool day care more than 30 hours a week as ''often'' aggressive, compared with 6% of those in care less than 10 hours a week.

For any given group of kids, about 16% will test out as aggressive using the list, but just 2% are in a serious problem range, Friedman says. So those with the most child-care experience look pretty normal. In contrast, youngsters with the least child-care exposure are less aggressive than is typical for kids overall.

Researchers are now checking to see if the children rated as aggressive by kindergarten teachers are the same kids seen by mothers and preschool day-care providers as having behavior problems at age 4 1/2, Friedman says.

* Is aggression caused by day care?

The only way to prove cause is to randomly ''assign'' children to day care or ''home with mom'' groups. This study just observed what happened when parents made their own choices.

The fact that as behavior worsened as child-care hours rose -- called a ''dose-response'' effect in science -- tends to support a causal link. But it definitely does not prove it. There's hardly any long-term, randomized research in day care. Randomized studies with poverty-level children do show that high-quality care improves their mental ability and adjustment.

* What else could be causing behavior problems if not the day care itself?

That's pure speculation. Scientists on the study wonder whether families with working moms aren't more stressed or whether children become more assertive when mothers aren't always available. Employed mothers may be more aggressive than stay-at-home moms, and kids may be modeling on this, or there may be genetic influences.

* Is this misbehavior permanent?

There is no way to tell.

But in study findings reported earlier, the day-care hours/aggression link appeared at age 2, only to disappear when kids were 3. At age 3, behavior problems no longer rose with hours of day care. And at that time, study author Jay Belsky, now of the University of London, told USA TODAY, these behavior problems could resurface in kindergarten when kids need to adapt to a new environment. Now, in kindergarten, the day-care hours/aggression link is back.

''It's eminently conceivable that these (new) results will dissipate over time,'' Belsky says. The kids are being followed at least through fifth grade, and scientists hope to extend the study through the 10th grade.

* Does this mean preschoolers would be better off if a parent stayed home with them?

Not necessarily, Friedman says.

Many families need a mom's paycheck to keep them above the poverty line, and low family income generally bodes poorly for kids' development.

Maternal depression is bad for children's mental health, so a depressed stay-at-home mom may be no panacea for children, either, Friedman says.

Many youngsters appear to be doing fine, she says. ''What's right for one family is not for another.''

* Is quality of child care irrelevant?

It's true that high-quality care only slightly offsets the tie between hours of care and behavior problems.

But care quality did affect kids' cognitive and language ability by age 4 1/2. Those in the best-quality care were the most able, even controlling for other factors that could affect a child's ability.

* What about working fathers' impact on children?

Study scientists don't know, because they decided 10 years ago to count father care as just another form of ''non-maternal'' day care.

''There wasn't much evidence about non-maternal care,'' Friedman says, and adding dad time to the equation could fog the meaning of the findings.

* What does this study mean for an individual child?

It's food for thought, but not something to rely on for decision-making, Friedman says. ''You have to watch your own child. If there are problems, get help to solve them. But there may not be problems.''

-- (cin@cin.cin), May 04, 2001

Answers

Interesting study, although I think they should elaborate the study on paternal care.

-- (cin@cin.cin), May 04, 2001.