4 ms·

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 th

• 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.