A longitudinal study was conducted in Sweden to examine the effects of center day care, family day care, and home care on the development of 145 children recruited at an average of 16 months of age. Multivariate analyses consistently indicated that type of care has no reliable impact on the children one and two years post-enrollment. The quality of home care and the quality of alternative care have equivalent effects on personality maturity, compliance, and emergent social skills with peers and adults. Measures of family social support networks, temperament, and child gender have more modest effects. PLS analyses have also shown that quality of home care was the most important predictor of intellectual competence one and two years after enrollment. Compliance with maternal requests in a task-like situation was also predicted by measures of the mothers' behavior during the observation series. A second study was focused on the association between infant daycare and security of infant-mother attachment in more than a dozen studies conducted by other investigators. Analyses showed no systematic relationship between enrollment in daycare and security of attachment.
| Ahnert, Lieselotte; Gunnar, Megan R; Lamb, Michael E et al. (2004) Transition to child care: associations with infant-mother attachment, infant negative emotion, and cortisol elevations. Child Dev 75:639-50 |
| Ahnert, Lieselotte; Lamb, Michael E (2003) Shared care: establishing a balance between home and child care settings. Child Dev 74:1044-9 |
