Infant day care. Maligned or malignant?

Today, the mothers of half the infants in the United States work outside the home. This concerns psychologists and parents because of the possible detrimental effects on these infants of separations from mother and experience in day care. Available data suggest that infants whose mothers work full time are somewhat more likely as one-year-olds to avoid their mothers after a brief separation and later to be less compliant with their mothers and more aggressive with their peers. The argument that these behaviors indicate that infants in day care are at risk for emotional insecurity and social maladjustment is evaluated in light of current research results. It is concluded that other interpretations of the data are more plausible and that further research on the factors moderating and mediating the effects of infant day care is needed.

Measuring difficult temperament the easy way.

In this study, the authors introduce a new measure of infant temperament, the Pictorial Assessment of Temperament (PAT), and provide information about its psychometric qualities based on findings from a study of 132 mothers and infants. The PAT is a 10-item measure of "difficult" temperament that is quick and easy to use and avoids some of the inherent problems in existing paper-and-pencil measures of temperament (e.g., complexity of response choices, dependence on respondents' educational level and verbal skills). It has convergent validity with the Revised Infant Temperament Questionnaire and with observed behavior in a laboratory procedure, moderate reliability and stability over time, and moderate agreement between mothers' and fathers' reports. Predictive validity was demonstrated by significant associations with the children's later disruptive behavior, behavior problems, lack of sociability, and negativity in interactions with their mother. Parent characteristics (agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, sensitivity, depression) were not related to scores on the PAT, demonstrating its discriminant validity.

Effects of parental separation and divorce on very young children.

Data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care were analyzed to explore effects of marital separation on children in the first 3 years of life. The sample included 73 never-married mothers and 97 separated mothers; a comparison group of 170 was conditionally randomly selected from the 2-parent families. Children in 2-parent families performed better than children in 1-parent families on assessments of cognitive and social abilities, problem behavior, attachment security, and behavior with mother. However, controlling for mothers' education and family income reduced these differences, and associations with separated-intact marital status were nonsignificant (the effect size was .01). Thus, children's psychological development was not affected by parental separation per se; it was related to mothers' income, education, ethnicity, child-rearing beliefs, depressive symptoms, and behavior.