Long Hours in Day Care do not Lead to Behavioral Problems in Kids

Spending long hours in day care does not lead to behavioral problems in children, a new study says.

To examine the link between hours spent in child care and behavioral problems, a team of researchers from Norway and Harvard Medical School looked at 75,000 children in day care.

To confirm the findings, researchers analyzed siblings who spent different hours in day care. They couldn't find any difference in the behavior of children from the same family who spent long hours or less time at the day care centers.

"The biggest surprise was that we found so little evidence of a relation between child care hours and behavior once we introduced conservative controls in an effort to ensure that any association was in fact causal," Eric Dearing, co-author of the report, said in a news release. "With such a very large sample, even very, very small correlations would be statistically significant. But we found no association in our most sophisticated models."

The findings come as a contradiction to previous studies in the U.S. that found children kept in day care at higher risks of exhibiting behavioral problems.

Two studies published in 2003 found children who spent long hours in child care experiencing more stress and displaying aggressiveness and other behavioral problems. 

Another study published in 2007 found children who spend time in child care more likely to engage in fights, become disobedient in school or argue at school.

Differences in policies of the countries - parental leave policies and national regulations for child care providers - may be leading to this occurrence, the authors said.

"In Norway, we do not find that children who spend a significant amount of time in child care have more behavior problems than other children," Dearing, explained. "This runs counter to several US studies that have shown a correlation between time in child care and behavior problems."

The findings of the study have been published in Child Development.