Day care can be very advantageous to those children who aren’t as fortunate as children who have highly literate and numerate parent’s to socialise and interact with their children. Children from not very bright family’s can really benefit form day care, so the kids will be prepared for later life.
For those mothers who feel isolated or bored at home, day care may provide a better alternative for their child. Brown and Harris (1978) conducted a classic study on depression in women. They found that many depressed women blamed their depression on being at home with their children. A depressed mother will not provide good child care.
Children can do much more things at the day care then at home-they will always be entertained. There are daily activities (such as painting, playhouses, sand pits, story time, friends to have fun with, and staff specially trained to look after children. Often mothers and infants at home are quite isolated: some mothers plonk the baby in front of the television for hours at a time- so day care in fact may provide a stimulating environment.
It is regularly know when children are first put into a new environment with much more people than the child is used to, then your child might be, at first, vulnerable to certain illnesses, but this in a way is good because it builds up your child’s immunity, which in later life is good.
Nevertheless, how something may seem to be good, Day care can always have bad points too. If no stimulation and interaction is offered to a child, then this can lead to a disruption in the attachment bond- which leads us back to Bowlbys maternal deprivation hypothesis, this states that prolonged separation from a primary caregiver will have both short and long term effects. Some people argue that day care is a form of prolonged separation The care offered at the place e.g. nursery is not always good, the carer’s might just want to look for peace and quiet rather than stimulation and empathy, especially when they are caring for a number of kids. This view has been supported in various research studies. For example, Bryant et al. (1980) found that some children in a childminding setting were actually disturbed, and suggested that this may be because childminders feel that they don’t have to form emotional bonds with the children. Howes and Hamilton (1992) found that secure attachments only occurred with 50% of caregivers as opposed to 70% of mothers. The lower rate of attachment probably reflects the lower quality and closeness of the caregiver relationship, which is probably due to the fact that day-care assistants are less committed to the child, less attached, and engages in less intense interactions.
As Bowlbys maternal deprivation states, separation is likely to result in deprivation when no substitute emotional care is offered. This mean that day-care provision that is lacking emotional support may well be detrimental. Of course it is not fair to say that all day care providers offer unstimulating and disinterested care, but a large number do. A study conducted in the US by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development found that 90% of day-care providers are providing less than ‘excellent’ day care.
So you’re probably thinking to your self, should I let my child receive day-care? Well it all depends upon the quality of care given not the quantity of care.