Infant day care and attachment.

Abstract

A group of home‐reared children and a group of children who had been enrolled in an infant day care center were examined at 30 months of age for differences in child‐mother and mother‐child attachment patterns. Essentially, no differences between the groups could be detected. However, an association was found between strength of attachment and developmental level of the child and between strength of attachment and amount of stimulation and support for development available in the home.

Emotional adjustment of children in day care who enrolled prior to or after the age of three

“…Throughout the life of the program, repeated assessments of the functioning of the children were made to determine if cognitive, social, or emotional changes associated with participation in the activities of the center could be detected. To date reports have appeared on cognitive gains Caldwell and Richmond, 1968;Caldwell and Smith, 1970;Caldwell, 1971) and on the nature of the emotional tie which developed between the children and their mothers (Caldwell, Wright, Honig, and Tannenbaum, 1970). This paper will report on a comparative clinical evaluation of the social and emotional adjustment of the older children who had been enrolled prior to or after age three.…”

Infant Development and Supplemental Care: a Comparative Review of Basic and Applied Research

“…Blehar (1974) also compared her results with those obtained by Caldwell et al (1970) and noted several methodological differences between the studies, including home observa tions in the latter study and laboratory observations in the former, age differences at entry to day care, and the use of different measures of attachment. She contended that it is necessary to assess negative attachment behaviors as well as positive ones because proxim ity-seeking may reflect anxiety of attachment as much as it reflects strength of attachment.…”

“…In contrast to Caldwell et al (1970), Doyle (1975), and Vinay (Williams, 1974), Blehar's (1974 research led her to conclude that day-care attendance has negative conse quences for attachment. Ten children who had entered day care at about 2 years of age were compared with ten who had entered at about 3 years and with comparably aged home reared controls.…”

“…Rather than studying parent-child attachment, Schwarz and his colleagues have chosen to assess other aspects of the social-emotional behavior of children with early day-care experience. Schwarz et al (1974a) studied 16 of the 23 children in the sample of Caldwell et al (1970) upon their transfer to a new day-care center. At the time of transfer their mean age was 3 years, 10 months; mean length of day-care attendance was 36 months.…”

Infant day care, parent-child attachment, and developmental risk: A reply to caruso

“…In fact, the topic of risk always has been implicit in investigations of day care attendance. Studies extending back to the initiation of day care research sought to identify whether developmental differences existed between children who attended day care and those who did not (e.g., Blanchard & Main, 1979;Blehar, 1974;Caldwell, Wright, Honig, & Tannenbaum, 1970; Ragozin, 1980;Roopnarine & Lamb, 1978). Lamb and Bornstein (1987) suggest that underlying all of this work on the effects of alternative care situations was the desire to determine if day care was bad for infants.…”