IN-HOME DAYCARE VS PUBLIC DAYCARE

In-home daycare Vs Public Daycare

In-home daycare Vs Public Daycare

Researchers have been more interested in studying differences in developmental outcomes for children who are in public daycare compared with those who are at home with their mothers. In a number of studies, they have found that children with experience in day care during the preschool years have advanced cognitive and language development and achievement relative to children who are at home, but there is a substantial body of research suggesting that the intellectual development of children who attend relatively high-quality day-care centers, nursery schools, or early childhood programs in the preschool years is advanced over the development of children from comparable family backgrounds who do not (Zinsmeister, 2005).

In a number of studies, children who attended day-care programs were also observed to be different in their social behavior. They were more self-confident, outgoing, assertive, verbally expressive, self-sufficient, and comfortable, and less distressed, timid, and fearful in new situations. They were more independent of their mothers in such situations; they went farther away and spent more time away and out of the mother''s sight. They exhibited more social skills and initiated more interaction in play with unfamiliar peers (Stone, 2006). They knew more about social rules. Like the differences in intellectual competence, differences in social competence appeared frequently, although not invariably, in these studies.

Researchers have also found that, in addition to being more independent and outgoing, children in day care are sometimes less polite, agreeable, and compliant with their mother''s or caregiver''s requests; louder and more boisterous, more irritable and rebellious, more likely to swear and have temper tantrums, and more likely to have behavior problems than children who are not or who have not been in day care. With peers, day-care children have been observed to be more aggressive and to engage in more negative interactions than children who have not attended day care --although this finding, too, is not inevitable (Michael, 2006).

But these studies of children''s social and cognitive development include an unspecified range of day-care settings, settings that offer widely different conditions and qualities of care, and, as the have already mentioned, differences in development are not found in every study or every day-care setting. To understand the source of the differences in development that do occur, it is necessary for researchers to explore these differences in day-care conditions. It is to such studies that the turn next (Stone, 2006).

There are, of course, many ways in which being in day care is different for children from being at home with mother. There are differences in the number of children in the setting, the level and content of the caregiver's training, and the frequency of formal educational activities. These differences are reflected in the children''s experiences in the two different kinds of environment. Children in day care, studies have shown, spend more of their time interacting with other children and have less frequent conversations with adults than children at home (Zinsmeister, ...