THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

By Richard Lacayo

Maybe the closest thing America has to a universal anxiety is the question shared by parents who have children in day care: Is this good for my kid? Last week the largest study ever undertaken of the effects of child care offered some reassurance. Very young children in day care do just about as well as those who stay at home with their mothers. In the area of learning skills, they do a bit better--provided the day care is good. But what is most important by far to development is the quality of a child's family experience during the hours at home.

The study, carried out by the Federal Government's National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, was conducted by prominent child-care researchers at 14 universities. Operating in nine states, they tracked 1,364 children from birth to age 3--the largest and most diverse group ever studied. More than 20% were cared for full time by their mothers. The rest were in day-care centers or in the homes of paid caregivers. Nearly half spent 30 hours or more each week in those settings.

The researchers found that children in high-quality day care--the kind in which adults talk to them a lot in a responsive way--have a slight advantage over kids in less attentive settings when it comes to language and learning abilities. Those include such skills as recognizing shapes or understanding relations among objects--what study coordinator Sarah Friedman of the NICHD called "the bedrock of school readiness." Then again, children who spend long hours in day care, especially low-quality care, were slightly less engaged in their interactions with moms, who were themselves less sensitive to the child's cues. That was noted in particular among mothers who used day care heavily before a child was six months old.

But the chief conclusion was that the impact of day care was far less important to the mental and emotional development of the children than was the character of their family life. That included everything from household income to their mother's vocabulary and the attention and intellectual stimulation they got at home. Researchers calculated that just 1% of the differences among children could be traced to day-care factors but 32% could be explained by the differing quality of their experiences within their families.

What's the message? Home is the learning center that counts. Stay tuned for updates. The researchers hope to follow the same group of children through the age of 7.

--By Richard Lacayo