Beginning at birth, babies form strong bonds with the caregivers in their lives-be they parents, grandparents or babysitters. According to Jay Belsky, Distinguished Professor of Human Development at Penn State University, not only can children form multiple attachments; they can benefit from them. “If you’re secure to Mom and Dad, that’s better than being secure to just Mom. If you’re secure to Mom, Dad and the babysitter, even better.”
Parents would do well to worry less about kids’ getting overly attached to a caregiver and more about finding the best possible care. According to a study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, scheduled for release in April, high-quality care is extremely important. The NICHD tracked 800 children to see how nonparental care affects mental and linguistic growth at 15, 24 and 36 months. The researchers found that “whether a baby spent zero hours or 60 hours a week in care, quantity of care did not influence cognitive and linguistic development,” says Sarah L. Friedman, scientific coordinator for the study. Children in “extensive care,” defined as more than 30 hours a week, did not score lower on tests of either cognition (problem solving, reasoning and attention) or language (vocabulary and sentence complexity).
More critical was quality of care. The NICHD researchers looked for “positive caregiving”–hugs, responsiveness to the child’s needs and, especially, verbal stimulation. The better the care, the better kids tended to score on cognitive and language tests. This doesn’t surprise Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute. “Children need warmth and responsiveness,” she says. “If a 2-year-old comes to daycare excited about seeing a firetruck, I want to hear the provider say, ‘We’ve got a book about fire trucks. Let’s look at the pictures’.”
If parents can find a caregiver who does that, their children reap the benefits. “A warm, loving care provider can give children a broader social horizon and teach them how to get along with adults who have different temperaments, different strengths and weaknesses, different skills,” says psychologist Alicia Lieberman of the University of California, San Francisco. Aimee, the Bond family’s nanny, gets a little embarrassed by her employer’s praise about how she has enriched the boys’ days. “I try to teach them as much as I can and to make it tim, because they are just as important to me as I am to them,” Aimee says. “I’m really just doing my job.”
30% of all parents say finding good day care has been a problem; 32% say they’ve had trouble finding a job with flexible-time options
