Looking behind headlines on preschools

The National Institute for Child Health and Human Development Study of Child Care and Youth Development is the most comprehensive look at child care to date. The study made news in April 2001, when Harvard researcher Kathleen McCartney and her colleagues presented their findings. "We were presenting lots of data ... the media focused on the bad news aspect of one paper," says McCartney. That bad news was that 17 percent of children who were in child care for more than 30 hours per week were rated as often aggressive toward other children when they got to kindergarten. Before parents rush to pull their children from child care - not an economic reality for most families - McCartney highlights some subtleties of the research that the media may have missed. For instance, she says, the study showed that higher-quality child care and parenting lessen the association between hours in child care and aggression. "These are things that parents can control," McCartney says.