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> [these findings] provide strong support for the argument that non-cognitive development is a crucial determinant of the long-term success of child care progra

> [these findings] provide strong support for the argument that non-cognitive development is a crucial determinant of the long-term success of child care programs. Okay so non-cognitive development is important and clearly lacking in government supported child-care. I think the more interesting question is: Why is there such a difference between government supported child-care and parental care? Not all stay-at-home parents are positive influences. And there are some great government child-care workers. Is it the parent-to-child ratio? Is it counter-productive programming? Is it oversocialization? And why don't these things affect the cognitive skill development just as badly?

sonnyblarney 8y ago
"non-cognitive development is important and clearly lacking in government supported child-care." I really doubt this. FYI I live in Quebec, and on my Highstreet there are a handful of daycares where normal businesses/stores/restaurants would be. Because they are small and common, it seems everyone is only a few hundred meters from their childcare around here. There are so, so many correlating factors that I'm going to say it's really difficult to measure these things. + The amount of marijuana that people smoke has skyrocketed in recent years, and they smoke young here. I know that smoking pot in early years i.e. 13-14 is bad news. + The number of children born to non-married and cohabitation parents is very high these days. + Quebec has a very different culture than the rest of N. America. They are chill here these days. For a lot of complex cultural and political reasons, I would say there is a defeatist, antagonist attitude (for the last 100 years), but in the most recent generation ... it's like they also have a kind of 'given up' attitude. They don't seem to care about much at all. I'm just throwing up some examples, I have no idea what it is, but I suggest that the issues in later education are due to a bunch of factors and that prevalence of childcare isn't really the big one. Maybe, but I doubt it. Also I should add that this 'universal childcare' thing is a huge deal. It really changes things. In the ROC ('Rest of Canada') or the US, it's getting stupid expensive to have children. Here in Quebec ... it seems 'normal' to have kids. Just a few dollars a day. My sister in BC is a Finance Director with 3 kids and she only breaks even on daycare (!!!) essentially doing her job so she still has it when the kids are out. That's insane. All political issues and massive costs/taxes aside ... having cheap, really local daycare is a hugely relevant thing to communities and parents.
- arandr0x 8y ago
  I also live in Quebec and I've been told by people that the education system (meaning primary and secondary education) has changed quite a bit, not for the best, since 1997. In addition, one of the measures in the study is hyperactivity and anxiety in school age children, and what I've heard relative to that is there are more diagnoses because before children were not being detected that young. I would have liked the study to try harder at controlling the effect, for example by comparing cohorts in regions where use of the government funded childcare is more/less common. Quebec has plenty of remote regions where people are more likely to rely on extended family for care. The comparison group for the crime rate effect is the rest of Canada -- what the data essentially says is, at the time of data collection, you were more likely to be a criminal as a Quebec teen vs a teen in the rest of Canada if you were born in 1998-2000, instead of 1993. The authors interpret this as "exposure to child care", but the more appropriate meaning is probably that younger teens are more likely to commit crimes in Quebec. It would be difficult to see why -- except there are also more high school dropouts in Quebec and the school system means 17 year olds are a lot more likely to have the kind of freedom that lets one commit crimes in Quebec. IDK, on this one, I buy the correlation but not the causation. (They break up crime by type and they're not overwhelmingly drug crimes though. So whichever is the cause for this effect, it's not solely drug related.)
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  > I would say there is a defeatist, antagonist attitude (for the last 100 years), but in the most recent generation ... it's like they also have a kind of 'given up' attitude. If you and pretty much everyone around you believed X and the rest of the country just did Y anyway every time you can't blame them. If you're not in control of your own destiny why bother since what you do won't matter?
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    Quebecers have more 'control over their destiny' than at any time in history, so if that were the case this were an issue, it would have been evident generations ago. There's a 'laissez faire' in this generation that is not there in the previous. Admittedly it's a pretty unscientific observation though :)
learc83 8y ago
>Is it the parent-to-child ratio? That's probably most of it. Studies show that siblings born too close together have reduced intelligence compared to siblings born further apart. Studies also show that the number of words per day spoken to a child has a direct impact on intelligence. A small child will completely monopolize all of your attention for huge chunks of the day. It's just not possible for one person to provide that much interaction to multiple children.
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  Studies probably show the opposite is true too. Social science has proved itself not to be trustworthy enough that we can just bandy about the terms "studies show" like it means something. It doesn't mean anything anymore and we need to start holding people to higher standards of proof and competency. As a rule I would suggest it's no longer viable to say studies show, you must provide the details of which studies have shown that. I'm not saying anything for or against your position by the way. Just "studies show" doesn't cut it any more.
  - learc83 8y ago
    >I'm not saying anything for or against your position by the way. Just "studies show" doesn't cut it any more. Studies show never "cut it" depending on what your definition of cut it is. I just assume that anyone that cares to look further into it can Google it if they want to. If it's a particularly contraversial, or unbelievable study I tend to take the time to link to it. But time a child spends interacting with adults correlates positively with intelligence, is very widely accepted/supported, so a Google search should be easy.
    - james_s_tayler 8y ago
      On the one hand I agree that it sort of did never really cut it, but on the other hand, culturally, it really felt like that before the whole reproducibility crisis went mainstream that science, while not infallible, was at least good and it worked and so could be trusted to some degree. And I think in that case yeah, if you wanted to poke further into things then you could just go hunt for the information. There really has been a three-pronged breakdown in trust over "studies" over the last few decades. First we learned to distrust the phrase "studies show" after we learned Big Tobacco paid for studies to show what they wanted to show. Next we learned to be more skeptical of studies show after the whole anti-vaxxer crowd latched onto fraudulent research. Finally after the reproducibility crisis went mainstream we are now facing the reality that the economics of the industry is bust and is driven it into a pathological state and there are massive systemic failures. This is a huge problem. Science is a really important part of our sense-making apparatus. It's social science in particular that so many widely accepted beliefs that came from research that turned out to not replicate. So what does it even matter that something is widely believed anymore? To quote Nietzsche "I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you." Culturally, we've turned a corner and we need to toss the phrase "studies show" out the window and push back when we hear it in isolation like that. We need to shine a light on the claims being made so that bad and/or incompetent actors can't hide in the shadows. It's one small step on the journey to mend our most important sense-making apparatus.
xenadu02 8y ago
> Okay so non-cognitive development is ... clearly lacking in government supported child-care [citation needed] The study did not make any such claim; it only claimed that non-cognitive development is important. One would need to study the non-cognitive development across various child-care providers, measuring by price, caregiver education level, curriculum, and a wide variety of other factors to determine which (if any) affect non-cognitive development. The problem could be as simple as improving the toys, games, and learning materials provided to the kids or as intractable as kids requiring a 1:1 caregiver (aka a stay-at-home parent). Or anywhere in-between.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

"non-cognitive development is important and clearly lacking in government supported child-care." I really doubt this. FYI I live in Quebec, and on my Highstreet there are a handful of daycares where normal businesses/stores/restaurants would be. Because they are small and common, it seems everyone is only a few hundred meters from their childcare around here. There are so, so many correlating factors that I'm going to say it's really difficult to measure these things. + The amount of marijuana that people smoke has skyrocketed in recent years, and they smoke young here. I know that smoking pot in early years i.e. 13-14 is bad news. + The number of children born to non-married and cohabitation parents is very high these days. + Quebec has a very different culture than the rest of N. America. They are chill here these days. For a lot of complex cultural and political reasons, I would say there is a defeatist, antagonist attitude (for the last 100 years), but in the most recent generation ... it's like they also have a kind of 'given up' attitude. They don't seem to care about much at all. I'm just throwing up some examples, I have no idea what it is, but I suggest that the issues in later education are due to a bunch of factors and that prevalence of childcare isn't really the big one. Maybe, but I doubt it. Also I should add that this 'universal childcare' thing is a huge deal. It really changes things. In the ROC ('Rest of Canada') or the US, it's getting stupid expensive to have children. Here in Quebec ... it seems 'normal' to have kids. Just a few dollars a day. My sister in BC is a Finance Director with 3 kids and she only breaks even on daycare (!!!) essentially doing her job so she still has it when the kids are out. That's insane. All political issues and massive costs/taxes aside ... having cheap, really local daycare is a hugely relevant thing to communities and parents.

arandr0x 8y ago
I also live in Quebec and I've been told by people that the education system (meaning primary and secondary education) has changed quite a bit, not for the best, since 1997. In addition, one of the measures in the study is hyperactivity and anxiety in school age children, and what I've heard relative to that is there are more diagnoses because before children were not being detected that young. I would have liked the study to try harder at controlling the effect, for example by comparing cohorts in regions where use of the government funded childcare is more/less common. Quebec has plenty of remote regions where people are more likely to rely on extended family for care. The comparison group for the crime rate effect is the rest of Canada -- what the data essentially says is, at the time of data collection, you were more likely to be a criminal as a Quebec teen vs a teen in the rest of Canada if you were born in 1998-2000, instead of 1993. The authors interpret this as "exposure to child care", but the more appropriate meaning is probably that younger teens are more likely to commit crimes in Quebec. It would be difficult to see why -- except there are also more high school dropouts in Quebec and the school system means 17 year olds are a lot more likely to have the kind of freedom that lets one commit crimes in Quebec. IDK, on this one, I buy the correlation but not the causation. (They break up crime by type and they're not overwhelmingly drug crimes though. So whichever is the cause for this effect, it's not solely drug related.)
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
> I would say there is a defeatist, antagonist attitude (for the last 100 years), but in the most recent generation ... it's like they also have a kind of 'given up' attitude. If you and pretty much everyone around you believed X and the rest of the country just did Y anyway every time you can't blame them. If you're not in control of your own destiny why bother since what you do won't matter?
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Quebecers have more 'control over their destiny' than at any time in history, so if that were the case this were an issue, it would have been evident generations ago. There's a 'laissez faire' in this generation that is not there in the previous. Admittedly it's a pretty unscientific observation though :)

learc83 8y ago

>Is it the parent-to-child ratio? That's probably most of it. Studies show that siblings born too close together have reduced intelligence compared to siblings born further apart. Studies also show that the number of words per day spoken to a child has a direct impact on intelligence. A small child will completely monopolize all of your attention for huge chunks of the day. It's just not possible for one person to provide that much interaction to multiple children.

james_s_tayler 8y ago
Studies probably show the opposite is true too. Social science has proved itself not to be trustworthy enough that we can just bandy about the terms "studies show" like it means something. It doesn't mean anything anymore and we need to start holding people to higher standards of proof and competency. As a rule I would suggest it's no longer viable to say studies show, you must provide the details of which studies have shown that. I'm not saying anything for or against your position by the way. Just "studies show" doesn't cut it any more.
- learc83 8y ago
  >I'm not saying anything for or against your position by the way. Just "studies show" doesn't cut it any more. Studies show never "cut it" depending on what your definition of cut it is. I just assume that anyone that cares to look further into it can Google it if they want to. If it's a particularly contraversial, or unbelievable study I tend to take the time to link to it. But time a child spends interacting with adults correlates positively with intelligence, is very widely accepted/supported, so a Google search should be easy.
  - james_s_tayler 8y ago
    On the one hand I agree that it sort of did never really cut it, but on the other hand, culturally, it really felt like that before the whole reproducibility crisis went mainstream that science, while not infallible, was at least good and it worked and so could be trusted to some degree. And I think in that case yeah, if you wanted to poke further into things then you could just go hunt for the information. There really has been a three-pronged breakdown in trust over "studies" over the last few decades. First we learned to distrust the phrase "studies show" after we learned Big Tobacco paid for studies to show what they wanted to show. Next we learned to be more skeptical of studies show after the whole anti-vaxxer crowd latched onto fraudulent research. Finally after the reproducibility crisis went mainstream we are now facing the reality that the economics of the industry is bust and is driven it into a pathological state and there are massive systemic failures. This is a huge problem. Science is a really important part of our sense-making apparatus. It's social science in particular that so many widely accepted beliefs that came from research that turned out to not replicate. So what does it even matter that something is widely believed anymore? To quote Nietzsche "I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you." Culturally, we've turned a corner and we need to toss the phrase "studies show" out the window and push back when we hear it in isolation like that. We need to shine a light on the claims being made so that bad and/or incompetent actors can't hide in the shadows. It's one small step on the journey to mend our most important sense-making apparatus.

xenadu02 8y ago

> Okay so non-cognitive development is ... clearly lacking in government supported child-care [citation needed] The study did not make any such claim; it only claimed that non-cognitive development is important. One would need to study the non-cognitive development across various child-care providers, measuring by price, caregiver education level, curriculum, and a wide variety of other factors to determine which (if any) affect non-cognitive development. The problem could be as simple as improving the toys, games, and learning materials provided to the kids or as intractable as kids requiring a 1:1 caregiver (aka a stay-at-home parent). Or anywhere in-between.