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Daycare: The Worst Thing for Kids Except Their Own Parents, Their Genetics, and Whatever Else We Forgot to Check
Posted by KTK

The New York Times plays its infuriating game again today, trumpeting a major study on child-raising with a headline that presents the data almost exactly backwards and gives “family values” conservatives every convenient falsehood they could have asked for.

What’s the scoop? Better read the headline and the alarming first paragraph of this major story:

Poor Behavior Is Linked to Time in Day Care  

A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade.

Wow! That message is pretty clear, and pretty ominous: farming your kids out to daycare for even one year causes long-term bad behavior! (Subtext: The children of women who dared to have a life of their own are doomed to delinquency, and it’s all their mothers’ fault.)

The data must be pretty bad. Let’s see just how bad:

The effect was slight, and well within the normal range for healthy children, the researchers found. And as expected, parents’ guidance and their genes had by far the strongest influence on how children behaved.

Oh. Anything else?

they also found that time spent in high-quality day care centers was correlated with higher vocabulary scores through elementary school.

Oh. Well, at least we know, now. Good to get some hard data:

Others [sic] experts were quick to question the results. The researchers could not randomly assign children to one kind of care or another; parents chose the kind of care that suited them. That meant there was no control group, so determining cause and effect was not possible. And some said that measures of day care quality left out important things.

Oh.

So what they really meant was:

Poor Behavior Is Linked to Poor Parenting and Genetics

A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more produces healthy children whose behavior is well within the normal range. Some kids do marginally better for about 6 or 7 years if their mommies sacrifice their entire careers and autonomy to follow their children around all day every day, but that’s obviously ridiculous and there’s no apparent need to do so. Daycare’s influence on child behavior ranks at least third in level of significance, trailing by far the influence of the parents themselves whether or not their children were in daycare. There is no evidence the effect of daycare persists beyond the sixth grade, though, as a random passerby who isn’t a drooling moron noted, “Bad parents and bad genes last forever”.

By the way, they didn’t use a control group and don’t know which types of daycare are relevant.

We already knew all this, but that didn’t stop us from boldfacing the one aspect of this study that had the least influence, over the shortest period, as if it was news.

We also didn’t bother to highlight the part about improved language skills.

It’s not like they simply stumbled into this by mistake. They had to go to extra effort to get from “The effect was slight, and well within the normal range . . . parents’ guidance and their genes had by far the strongest influence” to “keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive”. They deliberately dug their way down to the third-most-significant effect mentioned, which produces results “well within the normal range”, and then make that their headline. Of the three, that just happens to be the one that makes women look bad and will be used to criticize them and restrict their independence.

Indeed, the backlash is already beginning. Ann Althouse links the article as part of a post on bad schools; her entire content is to quote the first paragraph verbatim, without quoting or acknowledging any of the following take-backs. Insane alien-haired misogynist “Vox Day” quotes both the opening and the part about “normal range”, spares not the slightest moment to contemplate the contradiction, and then concludes that people who put their children in daycare would support Satan worship (I’m not kidding; it’s not clear if he is). Did the Times expect anything different?

Feed the nutjobs even the most obviously false nonsense, flattering to their prejudices, and they will inflate it into another right-wing myth without the slightest critical reflection. Tell them it’s false right in the second ‘graf, and it makes no difference. Give them an inflammatory headline and an ass-backwards lede, and then present the actual data, and which parts do you think they’ll start repeating and quoting?

This isn’t the first time the Times has taken on the Fox News role, but somehow I still find it in me to be disappointed.

[UPDATE: It isn’t only the Times. Echidne of the Snakes notes that almost-identical headlines are found, among other places, on Forbes.com, the Daily Telegraph, and, most disappointing, the Discovery Channel Website. It’s almost like there’s a . . . systematic bias against independent women . . . in society and the press, that defies scientific research undermining its conceptual foundations. Huh. Someone should look into that.]

March 26th, 2007 General, School, Culture, Education, News & Current Events | 7 comments