Is Daycare Bad For Kids Under Three?

Hint: this is a stupid question

Erica Komisar’s appearance on DOAC has reignited the daycare debate and given extra fuel and ferocity to those who feel that it is never, under any circumstances, okay to put your kid in a daycare under age 3. You all know what my feelings are about Erica Komisar at this point, but could she be right about daycare? Is there possibly a link between the rising rates of teen anxiety and depression and the fact that we are “abandoning” our children to these institutions?

In my experience, this is not a rational debate. It’s an emotional one. People don’t really give a hoot what the data say. They’ve already made up their minds based on their own values and personal experiences, and they are hell bent on convincing everyone else that they are right.

It’s true that the research on this topic is FRAUGHT. There is no consensus. It is, however, entirely possible to go into the literature and cherry pick studies that support whatever point of view you wish to support. But an honest assessment of the literature reveals the true complexity.

This shouldn’t really surprise you. The question, “is daycare for children under three okay?” is WAY too broad. I just had a fascinating conversation with Michaeleen Doucleff, author of Hunt, Gather, Parent and we both agreed that this is one of those domains where “science” might not really have the answers. Studying behavioral outcomes in children is always fraught, but even more so when the independent variable (daycare versus no daycare) includes so many different situations with so many different children. At best, the results give us averages, and averages have value, but they shouldn’t override our individual feelings and intuitions about what our particular child needs. You know, as a parent, when your child is thriving and when they are struggling. Listen to that and, more importantly, please stop generalizing based on your personal feelings and experiences in order to try and control the behavior and decisions of others.

Having said all that, I do think that the data still has some value, because what it shows more than anything is that the DETAILS MATTER. The quality of care matters. The time spent in care matters. The age of the child matters. The temperament of the child matters. The sensitivity of the mother and the father to that child when the child is home matters. The socioeconomic status of the family matters. Etc etc.

In that sense, the data will never give us a conclusive answer to the question “is daycare good or bad for children?” but it will show us how people making blanket statements like “daycare is always bad” or “daycare is always fine” are silly.

We will get into the data in future newsletters, but since the science on this topic is so conflicting and people’s feelings are so strong and so personal, I thought I would start with my own story.

Then we will review how this contrasts with the hunter-gatherer experience in order to assess whether modern childcare represents a case of “evolutionary mismatch” and use that framework as a guide for when we get into the data.

My experience: there is daycare and then there is daycare

After my son was born, my first, I was fortunate enough to have six months of paid maternity leave during which we spent nearly every sleeping and waking moment together. Let me be clear when I say that, although I was lucky to have such a long leave, this was not an enjoyable experience for me. In fact, I was lonely as fuck, and in retrospect, my son was probably sick of me too. Add to this that I didn’t have the slightest clue what I was doing, having exactly zero previous childcare experience and no one around who did have a clue to help guide me.

Then, after six months of seeing no one except my fussy, floppy little baby all day and doing nothing except nursing and cleaning up shit and spit-up, I had to abruptly return to work, full time.

I enrolled my son in a family-based daycare about ten minutes’ drive from our home. A good friend of mine, who lived in that same neighborhood, tipped me off to its existence. This was probably the 6th daycare I had visited (the previous 5 were seriously uninspiring) and I will not mince words in telling you that I was overjoyed to see this place. The woman who ran it, out of her home, was experienced and caring. There were only 6 children, and only two babies under two, and her husband, who was equally sweet and wonderful, also helped out on a regular basis. She had two older children, about 7 and 10, who loved to play with the little ones when they got home from school. She had a large outdoor space with a garden and chickens and my son loved to sit there and watch them. He loved watching the older children too and they, in turn, loved interacting with him. He and the other baby had their own room for napping and he slept like a log. He was never upset when I dropped him off and always looked happy when I picked him up.

My only honest regret about that arrangement was that I feel, in retrospect, that I left him there for too long each day. He was well-cared for. I had no doubt about that. But I needed to be with him more and I think he needed me too. At the time I felt that I didn’t really have any choice in the matter, because my job was full-time and they had refused to allow me to return to work part-time, even though that’s what I wanted. But in retrospect, I believe if I had really made a priority of it, I could have worked something out. For instance, I could have negotiated more days working from home and found ways to be with my son while I worked. After the pandemic arrived, my job did become remote, but by that time we were well-established in our routine and I didn’t want to rock the boat.

Then, when my son was about one year old, we moved to a new town, about 45 minutes away from where we had been living (and too far to commute to our wonderful daycare). It was now the height of the Covid pandemic and many daycares had closed. The only space I could find was in a large institutional daycare. Of course, they had the mandated 1:4 ratio of caregivers to babies in the “infant” section, but let me just say that there is a huge difference between a room full of 16 babies and 4 overwhelmed caregivers and a small group of six children in a home. This proved to be especially ridiculous when it came to naptime. The cribs were lined up like a row of gurneys in a disaster relief emergency care unit. Several babies were screaming at all times. Of course, my son could not sleep there. How could any baby sleep there?

To make matters worse, the caregiver churn rate was faster than my KitchenAid mixer on top speed. The app would notify me that Jen had cared for my son on Monday morning and Judy had cared for him in the afternoon, and on Tuesday morning it was Angelica and in the afternoon it was Monica. Who were these people? I had never met them. I had no idea who they were or whether they cared about my baby at all. He certainly did not know who they were. Still, he was a trooper and never complained when I dropped him, but I would watch through the window as he wandered around the small, gray room with the linoleum floors and artificial lighting, looking lost and confused.

It broke my heart. I couldn’t focus at work. I toughed it out for a month and then, after he got a cold so terrible that he had to be home with me for an entire week, I called the center to tell them that we would definitely not be coming back. I told my husband that we had to find better childcare or I would quit my job. Fortunately, my mother was able to fly in from out of state and help while we looked for a new situation so that I could keep up with the relentless pace of project management at my tech job that, like so many professions, made no space for caregiving.

The point of this story is to tell you about how there is daycare and then there is DAYCARE. I don’t need any data to know that my son was absolutely fine in the first daycare he attended, and I don’t need any data to know that he was not okay in the second. But in most “research” studies, these would both be considered “daycare.”

My heart goes out to the mothers who have no choice but to leave their babies in understaffed institutions, because we offer so little leave in this country and so many families depend on a double income. This daycare was the only affordable childcare option in the area (for those who could not afford a nanny) and it was still horrendously expensive by most countries’ standards. I don’t fault the daycare or the staff either. They were doing their best, underpaid and overworked, to offer this essential service at an affordable price.

The problem is not the mothers, not the daycare, and not even the mothers’ employers (who are just playing by the rules of the modern economy), but a failure of policy. We could, if we chose to, if we cared about children, invest in subsidizing care so that more mothers had access to high-quality options. We could mandate part-time return-to-work options for new mothers. We could offer mothers a minimum of three months paid leave. Most other developed countries offer mothers these things. The fact that ours does not is unacceptable.

But I also don’t think we necessarily need to wait around for policy changes in order to make better choices for ourselves and our children. When I had trouble finding quality daycare for my daughter, my second child, I decided I would just keep her home with me and work. This was challenging, but over time she has learned to entertain herself. It took training. There were struggles and yes, there were days when we used screens more than I like to admit, but ultimately she has learned to play independently while I work, and she is much happier being home with me (and I am so much happier having her there). Yes it’s a privilege to have this option, but I do think that we would make different choices if we prioritized our children, and our relationships with our children, more (not just mothers, but everyone).

The long evolutionary history of non-maternal caregiving

I find it funny how when we talk about “research” and “data” these days, we are almost always talking about studies done in the Western context, and then we interpret the conclusions as universal truths. In fact, the way we live and parent in Western society is extremely weird. Our culture, despite its socioeconomic dominance and growing global influence, is really at odds with the way in which most people still live.

That’s why I love the research on hunter-gatherer societies. It’s also why, I believe, many people trust the research on our evolutionary origins more than they trust the social science studies carried out in the contemporary West. Things that are natural tend to be good for us (yes, I know there are limits to this, but it is often true), and hunter-gatherers undeniably live in ways that are more in alignment with our evolved nature and needs as humans.

So how do they do childcare? How is this at odds (or not) with how we do things in the West today? And do the differences represent points of evolutionary mismatch?

When we look to the hunter-gatherer research, there is a significant shift in how much time the child spends with the mother after the child is weaned, usually around age three. This makes good, logical sense since breastfeeding children need to be near their mothers to nurse regularly. Of course, a newborn breastfeeds more frequently than a two-year-old and the data on how much time children spend in close physical proximity to their mothers reflects this, but for the most part, children under three in traditional societies are never far from their mothers. Since the debate on daycare tends to be much more contentious for children under three, let’s focus on what care looks like for those children, specifically.

As always, there is a whole lot of variability between societies and it’s hard to make sweeping generalizations, but in most hunter-gatherer societies, we can safely say that:

1. Children spend more time with their mothers in the first three years than with any other caregiver

2. BUT, the cumulative time that children spend with OTHER nonmaternal caregivers often exceeds the amount of time spent with the mother

3. Children are not always cared for by relatives

4. BUT the children know all of their caregivers intimately, usually from birth

5. The total amount of holding and care that children receive in hunter-gatherer societies is much higher than it is in the Western context

For instance, in !Kung society, mothers accounted for 75-80% of physical contact with infants over the course of the first twenty months (again, this was largely driven by the necessity of frequent, on-demand breastfeeding, which was essential for a baby’s survival), but !Kung mothers still received quite a lot more help than most Western mothers. One study compared American 10-month-old babies (who were home with their mothers in this study) with !Kung 10-month-old babies and found that the American babies had only about a third of the total physical contact that the !Kung babies had. But the !Kung babies had far more physical contact with non-mothers than the American babies. The American babies and the !Kung babies got roughly the SAME amount of MATERNAL attention, but the !Kung babies got much more TOTAL attention, because they also had all of these other caregivers attending to them. Babies in distress are responded to promptly in these societies, but not always by the mother. One study of !Kung mothers and infants found that for nearly half of the recorded incidences of infant crying, someone other than the mother responded, either together with the mother or alone.

In other societies, like the Hadza of Tanzania, newborns were held by someone other than the mother 85% of the time in the first days after birth. After the first few days, the amount of holding by group members declined. Over the course of the baby’s first year of life, Hadza mothers were involved in 78% of minutes, fathers and older sisters in roughly 18% each, grandmothers and older brothers in roughly 9% and all others in 29-41%. You will notice this does not add up to 100%. That’s because there is overlap. The mother is physically present and near her baby most of the time in the first year (again, because of frequent breastfeeding) but she is rarely alone, and not always engaged in active care. There is always a relative or friend on hand to help.

Among the Efe, a hunter-gatherer group living in the Ituri Rainforest of the Democratic Republic of Congo, babies averaged 14 different caretakers in the first days of life and non-maternal caregivers accounted for about 40% of infants’ daytime physical contact at three weeks and 60% at eight weeks.

Finally, recent research on the Agta, a hunter-gatherer group living in the Philippines, found that mothers accounted for a paltry 26% of infant care and only 19% of toddler care. Other related and unrelated caregivers did the rest: fathers accounted for 8% of infant care, grandparents for 6%, brothers for 7% , sisters for 8%, extended family (such as aunts and cousins) for 11%, distant relatives 14%, and completely unrelated individuals 20%.

So where does that leave us? Interpretation of this data is everything, and not everyone agrees on the conclusion.

For instance, anthropologist Sarah Hrdy makes a strong argument in her book Mothers and Others that this is proof of the flexible nature of human childcare. Children do not need the constant presence of their mothers in order to thrive. She says, “through attachment theory’s first half century, research focused on the infant’s relationship with this one other person: the mother. From an evolutionary perspective, however, mothers were far from the whole story…Hence, results from the first, large-scale empirical study of the effects of daycare came as a real surprise to hardline Bowlby [attachment theory] disciples who were convinced that babies develop best with full-time care with mothers.”

She goes on to review the results from the NICHD study (which we will get into later), admitting that “many factors influenced developmental outcomes for children in daycare” but that the “key finding” was that the sensitivity and responsiveness of a child’s caregivers, whether at home, with a nanny, or in a daycare, was the most important factor in their healthy development.

In Mothers and Others, Hrdy is mostly taking aim at the notion that children can only thrive while being cared for full time by their mothers (a theory that is clearly still alive and well if you listen to Erica Komisar and other like-minded conservative influencers). There is no doubt in my mind that she is absolutely right in this regard. But while she admits that things like hours spent away from home, child-to-caretaker ratios, and staff turnover all matter, if you look hard enough at her work, it’s fairly obvious to me that she is a proponent, not just of nonmaternal care, but of daycare specifically. She has been a strong public advocate for making quality, affordable childcare (including daycare) a priority in America.

I love Sarah Hrdy. She is my personal hero and largely the reason why I got into this line of work. Women have been restricted and confined to roles in the home for far too long based on a misunderstanding of “biology” and “evolution.” Sarah is one of the only serious academic researchers to challenge the notion of what it means to be a “good mother” in modern society, using the language of evolutionary biology (a language that has historically been used against us). But could she be wrong about daycare?

Nikhil Chaudhary, a professor at the University of Cambridge who has spent his life researching hunter-gatherer societies, thinks daycare could be a source of evolutionary mismatch and a factor in the poor mental health of children in modern society. In this letter to the editor, he explains, “hunter-gatherers live communally in camps of 25-70 individuals, thus babies are virtually never alone. Childcare is proximate, sensitive, and responsive.”

Skin to skin contact between mothers and babies in the first year has been shown to have psychological benefits for both (including secure attachment). There is some very interesting research suggesting that it reduces rates of postpartum depression. All babies in these societies cosleep with their mothers and are never left to cry it out. Although, Chaudhary admits, “empirical studies of the effect of leaving children to cry it out have produced conflicting results.”

He goes on to explain that while in hunter-gatherer societies, nonparents typically provide about half of a baby’s daytime care, the ratio of available caregivers to infants is often as high as 10:1, a stark contrast from the 1:4 ratio found in most contemporary daycare centers. (Note that a lot of this care comes from other children, as young as six years old, meaning that the switch from being a care receiver to a caregiver happens much earlier than in Western society).

Again, this all changes after the age of three, when children are weaned and begin spending most of their day playing in multi-age playgroups with little to no adult supervision while the adults go out to forage. Yes, there is some informal caregiving of younger children by older children, but on the whole, it’s a lot more like an outdoor benign-neglect daycare than a stay-home-with-Mom situation. In the US, we could start by offering free, high-quality, universal preschool starting at age 3, which is the norm in most other countries. In France, where my husband is from (and where we will be moving within the next couple of weeks) school is mandatory for children starting at age three.

That said, for children under three, I’ll admit that most daycares in the modern context don’t provide nearly the level of sensitive caregiving that a child would receive in a hunter-gatherer society, but that doesn’t automatically mean that it’s bad for them. Do children need that much holding and attention? Hunter-gatherers also have about 4 times as much circulating vitamin D in their blood as most Westerners, because of all the time they spend outside, but do all humans need that much vitamin D? We would probably all be better off with a bit more, but where’s the cutoff?

At the end of the day, I always come back to feeling like we have these two terrible options in contemporary society: stay home, alone, with your child all day (until you want to stab yourself in the eyeball with a fork) or put your precious baby in a shitty day care center where they will be left to cry it out on the linoleum floor (as described in Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch). My feeling is: young children need their mothers (or primary caregiver) AND other alloparents and caregivers, including other children. And mothers need helpers, friends, people to socialize with–and meaningful work that doesn’t include changing diapers and playing choo-choo trains all day long.

The real bummer of modern society is that we have made these things so incompatible, and I think the fight should be about how to reintegrate them: how to encourage communal living and extended care networks in our neighborhoods, how to integrate children into our social lives and into our work, how to advocate for more tolerance of bringing children to work, when appropriate, as well as to restaurants and social gatherings.

Unfortunately, in the meantime, daycare is often an essential piece of the elusive village. So now that we have covered the ways in which this is done in hunter-gatherer societies, let’s see what the research actually has to say about it in the Western context.

That might take a few newsletters to cover. Stay tuned.