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Bryan Caplan gives a postcard summary of a 1997 review of kid care quality:
Within a broad range of safe environments, quality variations in child care have only small and temporary effects on most children’s development. With a few exceptions that can be explained by correlations between family and child-care characteristics, studies both in the United States and elsewhere fail to find any long-term effects.
The review author, however, can’t seem to accept its obvious implication:
The results are not a license to ignore children’s interests in spending their days in emotionally supportive and intellectually stimulating programs. Just as adults suffer in socially unsupportive, boring work environments, even though their family lives may be satisfying, children with devoted parents are probably less happy in poor preschool programs. As a society, we can afford to provide interesting, good-quality care for all of our children.
Bryan retorts:
Adults accept “socially unsupportive, boring work environments” all the time. Why? Because there’s a trade-off between fun and money. Why should parents ignore this trade-off when they choose their children’s day care? … Once we accept that the point of child care is entertainment, we can probably find much cheaper ways to supply it.
To me the amazing thing is how long it takes for this sort of info to get out. Parents spend an awful lot on child care; why doesn’t the news media or Consumer Reports tell them not to waste money on more than fun care? My guess is that parents would be embarassed to be seen reading such an article; they’d rather signal how much they care about kids by believing that kid care matters.
Kid Care Need Only Be Fun
Commenting on comments:
KenF: My children didn’t ask to be born into this world, it is a burden I placed on them...
You placed on them the burden of living in one of the richest countries in the world in hands-down the richest era of the world. I doubt they're going to grow up to hate you for that. On the other hand, they'll probably resent you for handing down your negative attitude toward existence.
KenF, again: I believe, rightly or wrongly, that paying a lot buys me that, especially since it helps them gain entrance into elementary schools that offer a similar promise.
First off, one of the points here is to figure out whether that belief is right or wrong; if it's wrong, you can save a bunch of money to use on other things. Second, I've done the whole competitive-schools thing (highly-regarded 7-12-grade school, Ivy League university—which was harder to get into than if I'd gone to a worse high school), but at the elementary school level? That doesn't sound the slightest bit insane to you?
JH: Is there a bigger “I care about my kids” signal than a stay-at-home mom?
In the case of my family, it's a signal that child care in a city for two children costs more than their mom made. And she had a meaningful job with very family-friendly policies: she brought our second son to work with her for a while when he was a baby.
Tomasz: If the long-run effects of somewhat better or somewhat worse child care are unclear, that's an argument for reducing investment in child care and directing it toward something whose benefits are clear. (It's not a binary choice between having kids tutored by Nobel laureates on the one hand and sitting in a dark, damp cage for six hours a day on the other.)
Finally, the article in question is a literature survey, not a single study; this gives it significantly more weight. Even so, you should always keep in mind that tossing five heads in a row gets you past the p > 0.05 barrier for publishing in a social science journal.
You're right. All I have is the bayesian evdience that there occur to me several plausible criteria for choosing child care, and, aside from signalling, the study casts doubt on all but this one.