Sandra Scarr’s summary of the research shows that child care has little impact on children’s development.
Bryan Caplan feels that the policy implications should be clear:
I realize that “good-quality care for all our children” is a popular, feel-good proposal. Behavioral geneticists will make their lives more difficult if they criticize it. Yet intellectual integrity demands it. Key points that people need to hear even if they’d rather not:
- We don’t face a binary choice between boring day care that makes kids miserable and stimulating day care that makes kids joyful. There’s a continuous trade-off between cost and quality.
- Adults accept “socially unsupportive, boring work environments” all the time. Why? Because there’s a trade-off between fun and money. Why should parents ignore this trade-off when they choose their children’s day care?
- If the rationale for our current behavior was (consumption + investment) benefits, and the investment benefits turn out to be less than we thought, common sense tells us to spend less. If the investment benefits turn out to be non-existent, common sense tells us to spend a lot less.
- Once we accept that the point of child care is entertainment, we can probably find much cheaper ways to supply it. High-quality investment in children might require people with Ph.D.s in education and child psychology. That’s expensive. High-quality entertainment for children, in contrast, probably only requires some high-energy kids in high school or college. That’s cheap.