Living: Is Day Care Bad for Babies?

Expert opinion on child rearing is no less subject to fashion than the length of hemlines. Witness the advice given to parents by Psychologist John B. Watson in his influential 1928 handbook Psychological Care of Infant and Child: "Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning."

The views of child-development experts on day care have also fluctuated, often reflecting the prevailing political winds. They have swung from very negative in the 1950s to positive in the late '70s back toward negative in recent years. At the moment the field is deeply divided, with opposing camps interpreting the same evidence in different ways. At the heart of the debate is a question that could affect the psychological well-being of a generation of children and of their guilt-ridden working mothers: What are the long-term risks of day care?

The modern history of this debate began nearly 40 years ago with the work of ^ English Psychiatrist John Bowlby, who reported on orphans raised in British institutions following World War II. These infants received minimal care: adequate food, a warm place to sleep, and clean diapers. However, the battery of nurses who looked after them rarely held or cuddled them. To Bowlby's horror, he found that the babies completely lost interest in life. They stopped eating, playing or even looking up from their cribs. The report, published in 1951, was interpreted as a stern warning that mothers should raise their own children.

In the late '60s, as more women went to work and more babies went into day care, experts began to re-examine the question. One problem quickly emerged: how to measure the emotional well-being of a child too young to be interviewed. The answer, devised in 1969 by University of Virginia Psychologist Mary Ainsworth, was the strange-situation test, usually conducted on children twelve to 18 months old. It consists of a series of episodes in which the child is alternately visited and left by its mother and by a stranger, culminating with the stranger's departure and the mother's return. The researcher watches the child's responses from behind a one-way mirror. Secure children, it was thought, are less upset by the stranger's arrival and are easily comforted when the mother returns. The assumption is that the best gauge of a baby's mental health is a strong maternal bond.

The first round of studies using this yardstick found no significant differences between toddlers reared in day-care centers and those attended by Mom. In 1978 Psychologist Jay Belsky of Pennsylvania State University co- authored a report concluding that day care can be perfectly fine for young children. Around the same time other studies suggested that good-quality day care may actually confer certain advantages to children from impoverished homes, such as promoting intellectual growth. Nonparental child care, it seemed, had the blessing of the professionals.