The Trouble with Daycare

As is well known by now, the kids are not alright. American children are suffering from an epidemic of mental health problems. Naturally, everyone has a theory of why this should be so.

One of the most popular theories suggests that social media and their attendant gadgets produce addiction, to the point where they damage children’s minds.

It’s a theory, like another. 

Now,  Laura Wiley Haynes has written a long essay on Wesley Yang’s Substack, arguing that children’s mental health problems derive from the increased use of institutional daycare. Sending a baby to a daycare facility where the ratio of carers to babies is inadequate… damages children psychologically and cognitively.

It’s a theory, like another. It is worth some attention.

Haynes opens by presenting the statistics about child mental health.

By every objective measure, child mental health has gotten dramatically worse in the last few decades. Depression and anxiety, formerly rare in young children, have skyrocketed. In 1986, fewer than 2% of adolescents used a mental health service. Now, nearly a quarter of high school students have a diagnosable mental disorder.

In the mid-1980s, America turned toward group daycare for babies under the age of 1.

What happened?

What if an initial spike in institutionally-cared-for, very-young babies (from close to zero, prior to 1985, jumping to roughly one-third of babies) explains each of these subsequent spikes, as one neuro-developmental blow unspools in multiple ways over the lifespan? The timing is certainly eerie: autism spiking in three-year-olds, ADHD in grade schoolers, suicidal ideation in teens.  Rates of childhood obesity have tripled since the 1980’s, with morbid obesity striking at much earlier ages today too. In meta analysis, childhood obesity is associated with early full time care.

Children subjected to this lack of care, tend to fail to develop emotional self-regulation:

Achieving emotional self-regulation is a key accomplishment of early life, gradually learned by age three or four, via repeated modeling and being co-regulated by a trusted, beloved caregiver.

As you might have known, universal group daycare was a feminist triumph. It liberated women from childrearing and allowed them to advance their careers, to act as though they were men. Many women bought the theory, and this means that we must hesitate before suggesting that they had failed a primary moral responsibility:

Ever since the Mommy Wars ended in an exhausted, bitter truce, studies showing bad news about group daycare have tended to be presented cautiously, so as not to upset women, whether by calling into question a social change that’s widely regarded as a feminist triumph, enabling women’s economic and social liberation— or demonizing those moms for whom daycare is compulsory for economic survival.  But what if scaling up homecare (say UBI for young families) is cheaper and more effective for launching stable children in the long run? Tiptoeing around the damaging effects of early daycare may hold at bay the paradigm-shifting conversations we need.

In the Canadian province of Quebec, the government chose to offer group daycare at reduced rates. Many women signed up for it. What was the result?

By comparing the Quebec children’s psychological and behavioral outcomes with age-matched peers in other provinces, and by comparing children in Quebec who began as newborns with their elder ‘siblings,' who started at older ages, discrete negative effects of early group care emerged, beginning with markedly higher aggression, anxiety and hyperactivity in daycare-exposed children by early elementary school (ages 5-9).  These problems persisted: by older teens, “program exposure is associated with worsened health and life satisfaction, and increased rates of criminal activity. Increases in aggression and hyperactivity are concentrated in boys, as is the rise in the crime rates." These findings were similar to an earlier investigation by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, which began in 1991 and followed 1364 children: extensive use of early daycare correlated with behavior problems and negative social outcomes at four and a half, and on through age 15 (when the study ended). Full time day care predicted more teacher conflict, worse parent-child relationships, and high risk behaviors, like using drugs and alcohol.

What did these babies miss? They missed what Haynes calls emotional self-regulation, something that must be learned in relation to a single caregiver, either a mother or a nanny. Having one person care for five babies does not replicate the more normal condition:

The study’s conclusion remains blind to the idea that acquiring “non cognitive” skills, such as self-regulation, is an implicit, non-verbal, sensory, and deeply relational process, that unfolds via the intensive modeling and one-on-one “serve/ response” interactions provided by the dyad.

Thanks to feminism, we have failed to understand the important bond between mother and infant. 

Mothers and mothering matter to babies: even babies adopted at birth can suffer a sense of deep shock from the loss of their biological mother, whose body they have lived inside for nine months, hearing the soundtrack of her heartbeat and voice, feeling the shake of her laughter and the familiar rhythm of her gait. This sensory bond is formed well before birth. Without either denigrating or excusing fathers, or the myriad alternative arrangements in which individuals have been able to thrive, there can be no perfect substitute for that unique bond. Our language should not seek to euphemize this reality away.

Haynes continues:

Mothering, it turns out, is hard to scale up. In very early life, mothering is essentially 24/7 mind-body-state-tending. An aware mother notices a baby’s subtle cues of hunger, distress, or curious interest, and responds swiftly, whether to address a need, engage socially, or otherwise restore equilibrium. 

Especially under age one, when self-regulation skills are nil, a baby requires a great deal of "external co-regulation” just to manage the sensations of his body and the intensity of his feelings.

Obviously, a daycare worker cannot be an adequate substitute:

How can one daycare worker possibly co-regulate four or five infants, (the worker to child ratio in Quebec daycares for infants aged 0-17 months is now five to one) who may not even be emotionally bonded with her? How can her responses be as consistent, empathic, and swift, if her attention and arms must be shared among five equally-needy babies? What if one baby is smiling eagerly, one is whimpering and weeping, and one is throwing up? A single adult may keep five babies fed, napped, smiled at, and dry— but this is far from the same degree of emotional and physical shelter provided by responsive one-on-one care. 

The loss of a beloved attachment figure is one of the worst traumas a child can experience. Daycare thus carries a constellation of possible developmental injuries: less carrying, less external co-regulation, less relational stability and depth, more fear, more stress, and more loss. Is this the mental wallpaper we want for our kids? During the very time a baby’s psychological scaffolding is being built, daycare assails it.

I have quoted Haynes extensively in this post. For an obvious reason, a decided lack of experience on my part.

As I said, hers is a theory like another. It is surely worth your attention.