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It looks like Betteridge's law of headlines is beaten for once. Daycare is bad for affluent children. The effect was huge. It was a drop of 0.5% of IQ per mont

by burfog 7y ago

It looks like Betteridge's law of headlines is beaten for once. Daycare is bad for affluent children. The effect was huge. It was a drop of 0.5% of IQ per month. Not accounting for compounding, that is a drop of 10% in 20 months. Dropping from 130 to 117 is pretty serious. That is nearly a standard deviation. In some vague sense, the cause seems obvious: a. shared time with a stranger who at best has an education degree b. dedicated time with a family member who may be a lawyer, doctor, business owner, engineer, etc. The study claims to have eliminated disease and breastfeeding as possible causes for the difference.

dpark 7y ago
A drop of .5% per month is so huge that it’s not believable. Normal kids entering daycare could be exiting borderline mentally retarded. This doesn’t pass the sniff test. It seems likely that this sort of massive decline would be noticed already. Unfortunately I can’t access the paper so I have no idea what it actually says beyond this claim.
- burfog 7y ago
  Only the affluent kids get worse. Below-normal kids are improved, and normal kids are not affected. It seems daycare pulls kids toward the middle, wiping out the advantage or disadvantage of the family situation.
  - dpark 7y ago
    I could believe that daycare pulls everyone toward the mean (that's what school does in general, frankly), but I struggle with accepting the supposed magnitude. They include daycare from ages 4 months to 36 months, yielding an expected drop of 16% for a child who spends the full time in daycare. That's more than a full standard deviation and equivalent to the drop expected for >250 micrograms/dL of lead in the bloodstream (for reference, lead poisoning is50 micrograms/dL). [1] This drop is absolutely massive. [1] https://tbiomed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-4682-10-13 https://tbiomed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-4682...
    - burfog 7y ago
      These are babies and toddlers with rapidly growing brains. Much larger drops are observed in slightly worse daycare/orphanage/foster situations, so a drop of 16% isn't surprising to me. In the bad situations, brain structure is significantly changed. https://www.livescience.com/21778-early-neglect-alters-kids-brains.html https://www.livescience.com/21778-early-neglect-alters-kids-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_orphans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_orphans There is simply no substitute for a good mother. Being affluent tends to mean being industrious, conscientious, intelligent, and educated. It isn't popular for such women to stay home and raise lots of kids, but it makes a huge difference in the kids' lives and for the society that those kids will someday grow up to run.

by burfog 7y ago

dpark 7y ago

A drop of .5% per month is so huge that it’s not believable. Normal kids entering daycare could be exiting borderline mentally retarded. This doesn’t pass the sniff test. It seems likely that this sort of massive decline would be noticed already. Unfortunately I can’t access the paper so I have no idea what it actually says beyond this claim.

burfog 7y ago
Only the affluent kids get worse. Below-normal kids are improved, and normal kids are not affected. It seems daycare pulls kids toward the middle, wiping out the advantage or disadvantage of the family situation.
- dpark 7y ago
  I could believe that daycare pulls everyone toward the mean (that's what school does in general, frankly), but I struggle with accepting the supposed magnitude. They include daycare from ages 4 months to 36 months, yielding an expected drop of 16% for a child who spends the full time in daycare. That's more than a full standard deviation and equivalent to the drop expected for >250 micrograms/dL of lead in the bloodstream (for reference, lead poisoning is50 micrograms/dL). [1] This drop is absolutely massive. [1] https://tbiomed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-4682-10-13 https://tbiomed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-4682...
  - burfog 7y ago
    These are babies and toddlers with rapidly growing brains. Much larger drops are observed in slightly worse daycare/orphanage/foster situations, so a drop of 16% isn't surprising to me. In the bad situations, brain structure is significantly changed. https://www.livescience.com/21778-early-neglect-alters-kids-brains.html https://www.livescience.com/21778-early-neglect-alters-kids-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_orphans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_orphans There is simply no substitute for a good mother. Being affluent tends to mean being industrious, conscientious, intelligent, and educated. It isn't popular for such women to stay home and raise lots of kids, but it makes a huge difference in the kids' lives and for the society that those kids will someday grow up to run.