Infant Child Care and Attachment: Key Research Findings

Introduction: Infant Daycare and Developmental Concerns

There is much concern about how infant child care will affect a child's emotional attachment to his parents and shape his future behavioral profile. These concerns bear particular relevance at a time when the traditional family unit has evolved to include the likelihood of two working parents. Increasing numbers of infants are enrolled in some form of daycare at earlier and earlier stages in their lives, prompting renewed examination of the possible impact on both the child's parental attachment and future socialization. Recent debate has focused on the possibility that children enrolled in out-of-home child care as infants are at risk for later social and emotional difficulties (Belsky, 1988; Clarke-Stewart, 1988).

In assessing the role of infant child care on attachment and on the child's behavioral outcomes, a series of variables make the exact effects difficult to predict with any initial certainty. These mitigating factors include the extent of non-maternal care, its quality, and the nature of the family's own caregiving. This suggests that the role of infant daycare will be difficult to assess in isolation. A more inclusive investigation of the multiple factors at work in a single child's care experience offers a clearer picture of the types of predictions we can make about projected socio-emotional development.

Exploration of the impact of infant daycare on attachment requires a clear definition of attachment as it relates to the relationship between infant and parent. What is the biological or evolutionary purpose of the attachment phenomenon? It has been suggested that one of the characteristic behavioral systems that define us as human beings is that concerned with survival — specifically, the reproduction, care, and protection of our young. Attachment theory holds that this bonding behavior exists in biological support of the protection and survival of infants.

Attachment manifests in a variety of observable behaviors, including: exploratory behavior, crying, absence of crying, protest, proximity to the mother, avoidance of the mother, distress during brief everyday separations, and fear when encountering a stranger (Ainsworth, viii).

Defining Attachment and Its Developmental Role

What, then, is the basis for studies examining the impact of infant daycare on socialization or emotional development? Educators, child psychologists, parents, and child development researchers are concerned with the potentially negative impact of maternal employment on infant attachment. This focus draws attention away from the daycare environment itself, and rests instead on the child's experience of an unavailable maternal figure. Studies of the effects of maternal employment form the primary research base for the assertion that "infant child care constitutes risk for children" (Howes, 1989).

A child's attachment to its caregivers is assessed in terms of security. According to William Blatz's Security Theory (1996), a secure attachment to caregivers engenders confidence in a child, facilitating and promoting exploration of the world around him, and ensures that in the event of anxiety or discomfort, the child will return to the security provided by those caregivers. Insecurity in this attachment often results in the infant's reluctance to explore at all: the child is not confident that its caregivers will be consistently available when needed (Ainsworth, ix).

Mary Ainsworth developed, through a series of research experiments, a theory for assessing the nature of a child's attachment. In her expression of the infant's experience of the world, she developed the concept of the "strange situation" — a scenario that is unfamiliar to an infant. Through the manipulation of this environment, she endeavored to monitor the child's reaction to the relative strangeness of his surroundings, with the added and crucial variable of maternal accompaniment versus the presence of a friendly non-maternal caregiver.

The sequence of experiences induced for the infant was fixed and repetitive: a one-year-old and her mother are introduced into an unfamiliar playroom full of toys; a little while later, an adult stranger enters the room; the infant is then left alone with the stranger; mother and child are reunited; the mother is again removed and the child is left alone; the stranger re-enters; and the experiment concludes with the return of the mother.

Measuring Attachment: Ainsworth's Strange Situation

Ainsworth's scenario — an obvious simulation of the daycare experience — was shown in sixteen studies to demonstrate that infants whose mothers worked full-time were more likely to exhibit an insecure maternal attachment relationship compared with infants whose mothers worked part-time or not at all (Belsky, 1988; Clarke-Stewart, 1988).

However, simplifying the examination of the impact of infant care to a study of the link between attachment and daycare precludes assessment of the nature of that daycare. The quality and duration of the daycare environment are considerable variables in assessing its projected influence on a child, and Ainsworth's use of a generic "strange" environment excludes this fundamental variability.

How is the quality of daycare measured — or indeed the quality of any childcare, whether parental or otherwise? Once this has been examined, the relationship between different care scenarios must also be investigated if we are to arrive at a fair assessment of the genuine impact of infant daycare on a child's emotional and social development.

In the study "The Pennsylvania Infant and Family Development Project III: The Origins of Individual Differences in Infant-Mother Attachment," Belsky, Rovine, and Taylor (1984) assert that mothers who are both responsive and sensitive — who respond consistently and appropriately to a child's social bids and initiate interactions geared to the child's aptitudes, capacities, and developmental level — are most likely to raise children with secure maternal attachments. Is this ideal form of care exclusive to the mother as caregiver? Research has confirmed that infants form attachments to their non-maternal caregivers as well (Howes, Rodning, Galuzzo, & Myers, 1988), and that the quality of the child's attachment to the mother does not predict the quality of the child's attachment to an alternative caregiver (Howes et al., 1988). In other words, a secure attachment can be formed between a caregiver and an infant even in the absence of a secure maternal attachment. It follows that a high-quality daycare relationship can establish sufficient attachment security to improve rather than inhibit a child's emotional and social development.

Phillips and Howes (1987) identified three areas of quality in daycare settings:

Assessing Daycare Quality and Its Effects

Structural features: number of children, staff-to-child ratios, training level of caregivers, equipment, and available space.

Dynamic aspects: the nature and frequency of experiences and interactions between staff and children.

Contextual features: staff stability, staff turnover, and overall atmosphere.

The National Day Care Study (Roupp, Travers, Glantz, & Coelen, 1979) found that structural features had considerable effects on the manifest well-being of infants in daycare settings. Dynamic features — the quality and frequency of interactions between caregivers and children — were seen to have a profound effect on self-esteem and physical and cognitive abilities (Bredekamp, 1986). Contextual features, however, may be the most potent of all in defining quality childcare: "Child outcomes depend less on the form of care than on characteristics of the setting" (Phillips, 1987; Clarke-Stewart & Fein, 1984).

A study conducted by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Child Care Research Network (2003), entitled "Does Amount of Time Spent in Child Care Predict Socio-Emotional Adjustment During Transition to Kindergarten?", found that "the more time children spent in any of a variety of non-maternal care arrangements across the first 4.5 years of life, the more externalizing problems and conflict with adults they manifested at 54 months of age and in Kindergarten, as reported by mothers, caregivers, and teachers. These effects remained, for the most part, even when quality, type, and instability of child care were controlled, and when maternal sensitivity and other family background factors were taken into account. More time in care not only predicted problem behavior measured on a continuous scale in a dose-response pattern but also predicted at-risk levels of problem behavior as well as assertiveness, disobedience, and aggression."

This study establishes that time spent in daycare, regardless of its quality, correlates directly with a predictable problem profile in projected child behavior. This raises the question of how significant a role quality family care plays in counteracting this undesirable effect.

Conclusion: Attachment, Daycare, and a Balanced Approach

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