How Do You Spell 'Aggression'?

by Mary Eberstadt

(Page 5 of 7)

Another immediate harm caused by institutional care, well documented if still bitterly resisted, is that day care makes some children more belligerent and aggressive - and we are talking not only about the longer term here, but also about the here and now.

The latest evidence to back this claim, well publicized by all sides during the last two years, comes from lengthy investigations by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), one subset of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Beginning in 1989 a team of researchers began tracking children at ten different sites to determine what effects, if any, day care was having on them. Over the years various adverse findings have been thrashed out in the media and elsewhere - for example, that babies and toddlers at various ages appeared less attached to their mothers depending on the amount of time spent in nonmaternal care. Even so, perhaps nothing about the NICHD project has proved quite as incendiary as the lead article published in the July/August 2003 issue of Child Development that asked, "Does Amount of Time Spent in Child Care Predict Socioemotional Adjustment During the Transition to Kindergarten?"

Yes, said the research, and not in a good way, at least for some. "The more time children spent in any of a variety of nonmaternal care arrangements across the first 4.5 years of life, the more externalizing problems and conflict with adults they manifested at 54 months of age and in kindergarten, as reported by mothers, caregivers, and teachers" are perhaps the most quoted words of their report. "More time in care not only predicted problem behavior measured on a continuous scale in a dose-response pattern but also predicted at-risk (though not clinical) levels of problem behavior, as well as assertiveness, disobedience, and aggression."

As Jay Belsky, one of the lead researchers, explained elsewhere, the criteria for these problem behaviors were quite specific: aggression meant "cruelty to others, destroys own things, gets in many fights, threatens others, and hits others"; noncompliance/disobedience meant "defiant, uncooperative, fails to carry out assigned tasks, temper tantrums, and disrupts class discipline"; and assertiveness meant "bragging/boasting, talks too much, demands/wants attention, and argues a lot." All three behaviors increased alongside the amount of time in nonmaternal care. The effect did not hold for most of the children; Belsky stressed repeatedly that it was "modest."

He also stressed, however, that even modest negative findings are important for this reason: "In the U.S. more and more children are spending more and more time in nonmaternal care than ever before." Thus, something that has "a small effect on lots of children" can have a large impact on a given setting - such as school. As Belsky wrote, "Consider the consequences of being a teacher in a kindergarten classroom in which many children have a lot of early, extensive, and continuous child-care experience versus being a teacher in a classroom in which many fewer children have extensive child-care experience." Given the aggression findings, to put his point rhetorically, in which room would you rather teach?

For daring to draw attention to these findings, Belsky has been excoriated by numerous colleagues as well as by many separationist writers - all the more so because the link between day care and aggression was only the latest in a series of negative effects turned up by his research. His personal story, a fascinating example of the professional perils of ideological heresy, is told in detail in several places, among them Brian C. Robertson's book, a chapter in Robert Karen's thorough 1998 work, Becoming Attached, and a recent essay by Belsky himself titled "The Politicized Science of Day Care." Yet as Robertson also documents, Belsky's report on child aggression is only the latest to suggest that at least some children become more belligerent in day care than elsewhere. "As far as aggressive behavior goes," Robertson summarizes, "here too the recent studies simply underscore a long history of findings" - including those from a 1974 report in Developmental Psychology that found higher levels of verbal and physical abuse among day care children to numerous more recent studies which showed, as Belsky did, that at least some children institutionalized from infancy appear more likely to hit, kick, push, and otherwise behave badly than do children in noninstitutional care.

This same idea - that institutionalized children might become more aggressive on account of their surroundings - also received strong independent support from a very different kind of study published in Child Development in 1998. Here, researchers measured not behavior - which is intrinsically subjective - but, rather, levels of cortisol, a stress-related chemical, in day care children. And what they found was suggestive in the extreme - or, as the researchers put it, "remarkable and unexpected." While most humans apparently exhibit the same daily pattern in which cortisol is highest in the morning and falls in the afternoon, the day care children tested showed exactly the opposite pattern: Their cortisol levels were higher in the afternoon than in the morning. In other words, their internal stress, unlike that of other people, had apparently been mounting through their institutionalized day.

There is much more that one could relay in this social science vein about the connection between institutional care and aggression for at least some kids. Then again, just how many studies do we need to get the point? I have an independent, quite nonexpert source for the same connection, a mental picture worth a hundred research bulletins: biting. Yes, biting. Sitting next to me is a stack of advisory literature written for people who run day care centers or preschools, and apparently one of the most important things they must prepare for, to judge by the amount of attention it receives, is coping with the inevitable occasional outbreak of human biting. According to any number of authoritative sources, as one preschool publication puts it, the biting of one baby or toddler by another is "the earliest and most troublesome unacceptable behavior in the preschool," one that "can sweep through a preschool like the measles." Biting is one of the chief reasons that children are expelled from day care and preschool. An astonishing range of "strategies" have been devised for handling the problem, a range that of course also speaks to its ubiquity. To browse the literature is to learn that many babies and toddlers in institutional care bite and bite a lot. They bite themselves, one another, and, of course, teachers and adults, too.

Why is this fact so remarkable? Because it doesn't happen elsewhere the way it does in day care. On scholastic.com, for example, a resource for teachers, parents, and students, one parent invited to "ask the experts" about parental concerns put the point plaintively: "My two-year-old has been biting other kids at day care; however, she does not do this at home or at my friend's house. Why would she bite only at day care and play well everywhere else she goes?" Of course the "expert" answer is what one would expect - that the toddler may be lonely, in need of affection, frustrated, and so on. But the real point remains that day care, at least as ordinary experience suggests, makes biting and the feelings associated with it more likely.

This is something some readers will know not only from reading expert literature, but also from their own experience. Of course, as the experts stress, biting is a natural thing. A baby or toddler might do it in fun or because he is teething or simply because he is curious about what will happen. Many of us have seen that kind of biting (and felt it, too). But chronic biting? Contagious biting? No, that is something else altogether, and it is not the way children, even very small children, ordinarily behave. And why does this difference matter? Because if randomly assembled children of the same ages do not spontaneously start using their teeth as weapons, whereas the same kinds of children assembled in a day care situation do, this strongly suggests that the institutionalized ones are biting at least in part because something about their situation has them especially agitated. In other words, the attention given to biting in the literature on institutional care is itself a sign of what boosters deny - clear evidence that day care is causing aggressive behavior.

Our skeptical reader might say, "So what? Maybe biting isn't the best habit, but all of them will outgrow it. Besides, do any longitudinal studies show that recidivist biting of other children at the age of two predicts psychological or academic trouble down the road? No? Well, then, the problem is solved."

But of course the problem is not solved at all, because our skeptical reader has asked what for our purposes is the wrong question - the one about ends, not means. The right question, the one addressing the overlooked moral dimension of all this, is: What, after all, is the mental state of a bunch of babies and toddlers who take up biting as a habit? And we can all figure out the answer to that without reaching for the social science bookshelf: Those kids aren't happy. They are exhibiting a self-protective animal instinct, which suggests that they feel unprotected. It is something we would all understand readily enough if, say, zoo animals were to attack each other more frequently in their quarters than in the wild. (And if they did, we would, of course, deplore it and blame the zoo.) Doesn't that apparent internal turmoil say something undesirable about how institutional care is experienced by at least some small children?

© 2004 Penguin Group. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Mary Eberstadt is a part-time research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and consulting editor to Policy Review, the critically acclaimed journal of conservative thought. Her essays and reviews have also appeared in the Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, and Commentary.