There is an Instagram reel about day care that I think about all the time. It’s a clip from a podcast in which psychoanalyst Erica Komisar says: “When you drop your baby at day care, they think you died.” When this first came out, hundreds of parents shared it with me, usually accompanied by a panic emoji. Their main question: Am I ruining my kids by sending them to day care? Did I already ruin them?
There is a lot to say about this particular claim, but it’s also emblematic of a lot of the messaging parents hear about their decisions involving their children. Much of that messaging, like this particular clip, is designed to remove parental choice—to say, effectively, that it may look like there are multiple child-rearing options, but one of them is so horrible that only someone who doesn’t care at all about their child would make that choice. Go ahead and send your child to day care, just do so knowing that it’s likely to lead them to a terrible life. The message takes a potential array of choices about how to care for a young child and instead presents the issue as a false choice.
This issue is not limited to child care; there are other hot-button parenting issues like breastfeeding, sleep training, toilet training. In social media, on Reddit threads, in online moms’ discussion groups, these are all presented as opportunities to make terrible choices that could ruin your child’s future. We even see this messaging in what seem like very milquetoast things like how to start your infant on solid foods. There is a debate about whether to feed them pureed foods first, or use a method called “baby-led weaning” where children start with finger foods. Someone told me once that if you start a child on purees, they will never learn to chew—a ridiculous claim, but also one that’s nervewracking if you’re a young parent trying to do the right thing. Who doesn’t want their child to be able to chew?
As a person who spends her life steeped in data around parenting and child outcomes, I find this “you’re doing it wrong” messaging especially bizarre because, for most early childhood parenting, the outcome differences based on your choices tend to be small. Let’s take day care as an example.
There are two ways to study the impact of day care on children. One is to compare children who attend day care to those who do not. This approach has an obvious problem in that families who send their children to day care differ in other ways from those who do not (including socioeconomic status, race, marital status, and so on). It’s extremely difficult to know whether outcomes for children are driven by the child care setup or these other factors. To use data like this, it’s necessary to at least try to carefully adjust for family differences.
The best study of this type comes from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Released in 2006, the study was large (involving more than 1,000 kids), followed children in phases from birth through ninth grade, and also observed the subjects’ home environment. What the researchers found is that time in center-based child care before 18 months of age is associated with slightly worse behavior later, and time spent in such centers after 18 months is associated with slightly higher cognitive outcomes later. Both effects are very small—much smaller than the impact of a child’s home environment. The authors also found that higher-quality day care—with responsive providers, access to books, providers who do not hit the children, and consistent access to food and diapers—is associated with better outcomes.
The other way to study this question is to analyze differences in child care policy, often in countries outside the U.S. where access to such care is more readily available. Based on studies from Germany, Norway, Canada, and Italy, the overall picture is mixed. Some studies show day care attendance having positive impacts, some show it having negative ones. Much of the variation seems to relate to the quality of the child care.
Yes, there are things that matter for our kids’ long-term success and happiness—having a safe place to live, enough to eat, stable adults who love them and are not abusive—but a lot of what happens in our children’s lives is simply out of our control.
Putting this together with the NICHD study, the overall picture suggests two things. First, child care quality matters—this is true whether it is child care provided by a day care center, by a home-based day care, by a nanny, or even by a parent. Notably, when the researchers measure quality they do not look for things like fancy organic snacks and Mandarin language immersion. Quality means providers who pay attention to kids and meet their needs. Second, the impacts on children are quite limited—there might be some small downsides or some small upsides of a particular child care arrangement, but there is nothing in these data that would say that one choice is obviously the right one.
At the end of the day, when it comes to child care or many other hot-button parenting topics, the data generally looks like this. Sometimes there are some small benefits one way or the other (breastfeeding, for example) and sometimes it really doesn’t matter at all (starting solid foods). Strangely, in the few cases where the data is clear on what is the optimal way to parent (like how to introduce allergenic foods), there is much less online chatter and aggressive messaging.
If we accept as true the idea that messaging to parents is often far more black-and-white than what the data supports, the interesting question is why. How and why did we get to this point (and how might we get out)?
I believe that the incentives of social media engagement are a fairly core issue. That reel about “your baby thinks you are dead” got a lot of views. Our attention is drawn by extreme, panic-inducing headlines. The algorithm notices and serves us more of them. That incentive then drives the people who create content. The content gets more extreme, and our social media feeds evolve along with it.
Why do these headlines draw our attention? Partly, it’s just that fear sells. But I believe a second reason is that the current generation of parents with young children—those who became parents in the age of social media—has been sold an idea that our children’ s outcomes are completely within our control—that if you do things exactly right, you can ensure a happy, successful and productive kid. Conversely, if you mess up, it’s over for your kid (he or she will not learn to chew) and it’s all your fault. This mindset begins before conception and continues through childhood.
And it’s a mindset that is, of course, false. Yes, there are things that matter for our kids’ long-term success and happiness—having a safe place to live, enough to eat, stable adults who love them and are not abusive—but a lot of what happens in our children’s lives is simply out of our control. The small choices we make in parenting are not what drives these outcomes.
This is hard to accept for those of us who like control, but if you can accept it, it’s very liberating because it validates our free will. If we accept that there are many reasonable choices from the standpoint of raising and guiding our children, we can go back to making choices that work for our own families—choices that make parents happy and make the entire family function better. Those choices will not be the same for everyone, which is kind of the point.
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