the Reverend Bayes strikes again

I've been a mother for 19 years.

Throughout all of that time I've been reading articles, news items, and studies telling me daycare is not only harmless but actively good for children; daycare is the superior choice, better than being cooped up alone with your crazy mother. Quality time, not quantity time. The culture spent years banging on about that one.

I heard it all.

Children raised in daycare had better immune systems, better social skills, were better prepared for Kindergarten - you name it, some researcher somewhere had found it and I had read it.

It was endless.

My favorite moment was the day, probaby 16 or 17 years ago, I read an article in the New York Times characterizing boys raised in daycare as less sensitive and less responsive to adult direction than boys raised at home. My ears pricked up at that one. Whoa, I thought. A study showing daycare is bad for children! Heads must be spinning out there at the Times.

But no.

That wasn't what the study showed at all.

The study showed daycare was good for children.

Stay-at-home moms were the bad thing. Our boys were sensitive little wimps. If you wanted a manly boy, you had to go with daycare.



Pretty early on, I decided all of this stuff was likely to be bunk.

I used my Bayes brain to figure it out.



So what do I find in today's issue of the New York Times?

Gosh, it's an article on the very bad effects of daycare!

What a surprise!

Who would have thought!

Starting in 1997, the Quebec Family Policy subsidized day care for 4-year-olds at government-approved centers around the province. By 2000, the program had expanded to cover any child not old enough for kindergarten, all the way down to infants....

Centers from downtown Montreal to Hudson Bay were flooded with applications....

Almost a decade after the family policy started, however, there was still a big mystery about it. Nobody had done the work to find out how it had affected children. The province was spending $1.4 billion a year on a grand social experiment, yet no one had bothered to look at the results.

So three economists took up the challenge a few years ago, realizing that the program offered an excellent way to examine a much-debated topic....

When they finished last year, the answer seemed clear. "Across almost everything we looked at," said Mr. Gruber, an M.I.T., professor, "the policy led to much worse outcomes for kids."

Young children in Quebec are more anxious and aggressive than they were a decade ago, even though children elsewhere in Canada did not show big changes. Quebec children also learn to use a toilet, climb stairs and count to three at later ages, on average, than they once did. The effects weren't so great for parents, either. More of them reported being depressed, and they were less satisfied with their marriages — which also didn't happen in other provinces.

Before you dismiss the researchers as just three more men starting a new assault in the mommy wars, listen to Jane Waldfogel, a leading child-policy researcher and the author of the book, "What Children Need" (Harvard University Press). "This is a very high-quality paper by high-quality guys," she said. "They're very careful. This is a paper that's going to stand."