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“Our continuing, longitudinal investigation of children’s development in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care will determine the ultimate importance of these findings for developmentalists, policy-makers, and parents, as we consider the effects of early child care on longer-term outcomes and on the broader variety of social-emotional, cognitive, and health outcomes the study was designed to assess. To the extent that evidence emerges in future analyses that early child care is associated with problem behavior or developmental deficits at older ages, these findings will take on greater importance. To the extent, however, that evaluations of child-care effects in the longitudinal follow-up to this investigation provide no evidence of developmental disadvantages associated with early care, then even concerns raised by the findings released to date would be mitigated. In sum, the full meaning of the child-care findings reported to date will not become clear until more is known about the development of the children participating in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care.”
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