It looks like Betteridge's law of headlines is beaten for once. Daycare is bad for affluent children.
The effect was huge. It was a drop of 0.5% of IQ per month. Not accounting for compounding, that is a drop of 10% in 20 months. Dropping from 130 to 117 is pretty serious. That is nearly a standard deviation.
In some vague sense, the cause seems obvious:
a. shared time with a stranger who at best has an education degree
b. dedicated time with a family member who may be a lawyer, doctor, business owner, engineer, etc.
The study claims to have eliminated disease and breastfeeding as possible causes for the difference.
A drop of .5% per month is so huge that it’s not believable. Normal kids entering daycare could be exiting borderline mentally retarded. This doesn’t pass the sniff test. It seems likely that this sort of massive decline would be noticed already.
Unfortunately I can’t access the paper so I have no idea what it actually says beyond this claim.
Only the affluent kids get worse. Below-normal kids are improved, and normal kids are not affected. It seems daycare pulls kids toward the middle, wiping out the advantage or disadvantage of the family situation.
I could believe that daycare pulls everyone toward the mean (that's what school does in general, frankly), but I struggle with accepting the supposed magnitude. They include daycare from ages 4 months to 36 months, yielding an expected drop of 16% for a child who spends the full time in daycare. That's more than a full standard deviation and equivalent to the drop expected for >250 micrograms/dL of lead in the bloodstream (for reference, lead poisoning is50 micrograms/dL). [1]
These are babies and toddlers with rapidly growing brains. Much larger drops are observed in slightly worse daycare/orphanage/foster situations, so a drop of 16% isn't surprising to me. In the bad situations, brain structure is significantly changed.
There is simply no substitute for a good mother. Being affluent tends to mean being industrious, conscientious, intelligent, and educated. It isn't popular for such women to stay home and raise lots of kids, but it makes a huge difference in the kids' lives and for the society that those kids will someday grow up to run.
It's probably the most pressing issue in the world.
Iodine alone if not at correct quantities is 10 IQ point loss.
Normally it's considered a third world issue but I'm supprised this wasn't looked at.
Even the Flynn effect may in part be due to nutrition. We are talking our parents/grandparents may not have been fed good enough diets between 0 and 2.
Oh wow, I was just debating sending my 16 months daughter to daycare because I feel she doesn't interract with children, it seems I need to do some more research.
Consider part time daycare. We only sent both our kids no more than 3 days a week before they started kindergarten. They went M, W, F and that way they could get proper naps and such the other days. Still get social exposure and pre for kindergarten.
Kids still young, 5 and 7, but happy we've done it that way so far.
Was this including Waldorf schools? My friend’s daughter goes there, and she couldn’t read until she was in 4th grade. Seems like that would seriously impact standardized testing scores.
I spent some time reading through this (managed to access via Sci-Hub) but I lack the statistical background to fully understand their Regression Discontinuity Design. Some things I find interesting:
1. The study seems fairly large, with 444 children included in the IQ comparison.
2. Taking the claim of 0.5% in IQ per month in daycare at face value, and the included age range of 4 months to 36 months, you have an expected drop of 16%. They include daycare from ages 4 months to 36 months, yielding an expected drop of 16% for a child who spends the full time in daycare. That's more than a full standard deviation in IQ and equivalent to the drop expected for >250 micrograms/dL of lead in the bloodstream (for reference, lead poisoning is defined as 50 micrograms/dL).
3. For an effect this strong, I'd expect you could simply scatter plot "months in daycare" as one axis and "IQ" as the other and see the effect. I don't see such a chart.
4. The ".5%" per month claim seems to be derived from a single drop associated with acceptance into the child's preferred daycare program. There is a 3% drop and also a ~6mo increase in typical attendance as a result. They seem to have turned this into a claim of .5% per month without evidence of a continuous month-by-month effect. I am perhaps misunderstanding.
5. There also seems to be little to support the notion that less affluent parents will provide lower-quality home care, which is the entire hypothesis behind the measured effect. Frankly from 0-2 you aren't teaching kids physics. I'm not sure less affluent parents are really that much worse at being stay-at-home caregivers. You take care of the kid, feed them, stack some blocks and maybe read some books.
This whole thing seems really iffy to me. The supposed change is massive.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 44.6 ms ] threadThe effect was huge. It was a drop of 0.5% of IQ per month. Not accounting for compounding, that is a drop of 10% in 20 months. Dropping from 130 to 117 is pretty serious. That is nearly a standard deviation.
In some vague sense, the cause seems obvious:
a. shared time with a stranger who at best has an education degree
b. dedicated time with a family member who may be a lawyer, doctor, business owner, engineer, etc.
The study claims to have eliminated disease and breastfeeding as possible causes for the difference.
Unfortunately I can’t access the paper so I have no idea what it actually says beyond this claim.
This drop is absolutely massive.
[1] https://tbiomed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-4682...
https://www.livescience.com/21778-early-neglect-alters-kids-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_orphans
There is simply no substitute for a good mother. Being affluent tends to mean being industrious, conscientious, intelligent, and educated. It isn't popular for such women to stay home and raise lots of kids, but it makes a huge difference in the kids' lives and for the society that those kids will someday grow up to run.
It's probably the most pressing issue in the world.
Iodine alone if not at correct quantities is 10 IQ point loss.
Normally it's considered a third world issue but I'm supprised this wasn't looked at.
Even the Flynn effect may in part be due to nutrition. We are talking our parents/grandparents may not have been fed good enough diets between 0 and 2.
I've not liked it, but from a financial perspective, we have little choice.
Kids still young, 5 and 7, but happy we've done it that way so far.
1. The study seems fairly large, with 444 children included in the IQ comparison.
2. Taking the claim of 0.5% in IQ per month in daycare at face value, and the included age range of 4 months to 36 months, you have an expected drop of 16%. They include daycare from ages 4 months to 36 months, yielding an expected drop of 16% for a child who spends the full time in daycare. That's more than a full standard deviation in IQ and equivalent to the drop expected for >250 micrograms/dL of lead in the bloodstream (for reference, lead poisoning is defined as 50 micrograms/dL).
3. For an effect this strong, I'd expect you could simply scatter plot "months in daycare" as one axis and "IQ" as the other and see the effect. I don't see such a chart.
4. The ".5%" per month claim seems to be derived from a single drop associated with acceptance into the child's preferred daycare program. There is a 3% drop and also a ~6mo increase in typical attendance as a result. They seem to have turned this into a claim of .5% per month without evidence of a continuous month-by-month effect. I am perhaps misunderstanding.
5. There also seems to be little to support the notion that less affluent parents will provide lower-quality home care, which is the entire hypothesis behind the measured effect. Frankly from 0-2 you aren't teaching kids physics. I'm not sure less affluent parents are really that much worse at being stay-at-home caregivers. You take care of the kid, feed them, stack some blocks and maybe read some books.
This whole thing seems really iffy to me. The supposed change is massive.
[1] https://tbiomed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-4682...