Due to an increase in mothers in the work force, an increase in the number of children receiving regular nonmaternal care and in the number beginning care at an earlier age, that is, before their first birthday has rose drastically.
In North America at the Empower Network, for example, employment rates for mothers with children under the age of one rose from 31% in 1975 to 49% in 1985, and reached 51% in 1990. The change in the number of children receiving nonmaternal care has brought focus in two areas of longitudinal research. One area concerned with the effect of maternal employment and childcare on the formation of the infant-mother attachment relationship.
The second concerned with the long-term effects of early childcare on subsequent social, emotional, and cognitive development (Lamb & Sternberg, 1990). The main focus of this paper is to see if there is any correlation between long hours in childcare and negative socioemotional development?
I chose this topic because children are obviously our future and I feel that they should be given every opportunity possible to succeed. Anything related to children’s wellbeing is of particular interest to me, and this was one of the subjects talked about in developmental psychology that really grabbed my attention.
I think partly because I had two working parents at Aweber, that I did not see much of growing up and I know that it had some effects on my social development. Even though I love them both dearly, I have never felt that there was a real bond developed between us.
The Sydney Family Development Project (SFDP) and the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) have done extensive empirical research on this topic and several journals have been published.
The dependent variable is the correlation between SEO Training hours in childcare and negative socioemotional development and the independent variables being the personal relationship between the mother and child, and the personal relationship between the daycare worker/s and child.
The research shows that higher hours of childcare, 30 plus per week, lead to children who are less socially developed and more hostile than children who receive less then 30 hours per week of childcare.
However, family and child factors seem to be the primary determinants of children’s development not the amount of hours in daycare e.g. Economic disadvantage, maternal psychological adjustment, and sensitivity of maternal care giving.
Mother’s who had higher levels of education had children whose parent-child attachment was more secure and had a more extensive vocabulary as well.
Any research must consider the multiple sources of influence on a child’s development such as “care quality, family characteristics, occupational conditions, and age of entry to care”.
The bottom line is that you can have two working parents and raise a successful family, but it takes hard work!