Daycare Round 2

Mark sent me a link to Emily Bazelon's article, The Kids Are Alright, in Slate.com. She interviewed study's author, Margaret Burchinal. The article is worth reading in it's entirety.

One thing that is lost in much of the media hoopla is how little high quality daycare they found in their data set. Nearly all the families that used center-based care used low-quality ones, probably because they are the cheapest. They wanted to compare high and low quality daycare centers, but there weren't enough kids in high-quality daycare for them to do a meaningful comparison.

The media also overlooked the finding that the behavior problems increased only by a very slight amount, and mainly for kids who had spent 4 years or more in day care centers by the time they were 4 1/2 years of age. That meant they were in poor quality day care centers from infancy.

That makes me unbelievably sad, that parents are leaving their children in places that they know are not high-quality, but can't afford better.

When we were searching for daycare, we looked at a variety of places, both in centers and homes. In our research, we were astonished that ratios as high as 6:1 are allowed in daycare centers in most states. Who can take care of that many babies at once?

We put Iris in one of the most expensive ones because it had a 3:1 infant to caregiver ratio, versus the 4:1 required by California law. The kids seemed happier and the employees less stressed out. (It was also a 7 minute walk from our house and the bus stop for the line to our workplace was 50 feet away.)

Whenever we visited, it seemed like about 1/3 of the babies were sleeping and 1-2 babies were being held by each child care provider. When meal or diaper change time came, a center "floater" came to assist. Often, parents were visiting at the center. I was there often because I worked 20-30 hours a week back then and breast fed Iris at the center during my break.

As soon as she was able to sit up, she was playing games with the staff. We even have pictures of her finger painting at 11 weeks! The families bonded at the day care center. Today, she still plays with those friends.

In closing, did you notice that the articles almost always state that 1364 children were followed in the study? According to the NIH summary, they had lost track of nearly 300 children by 2004; the recently published results follow 1073 children. By the next report, they will likely have lost a few more.

Link
Blogger Linda Thomas has a humorous take on this.

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

Does using daycare make you a bad mother? Some people reading recent study results might conclude that. I don't really know; it is not my research area. However, I do know a few things about handling statistics.

Mark Twain wrote, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." (Actually, there is some confusion about who first coined this phrase.)

First off, read the report and see how the data were collected. The NIH, the people who funded the study, has an online overview of the longitudinal study. (Longitudinal studies follow the same group over time.)

The researchers recruited families with newborns in ten hospitals around the US to participate in this study. In 1991, there were 1364 children in this study. By 2004, there were only 1073 children, a loss of over 21%. No one knows why those children, or their families, dropped out of the study. The researchers are careful to point out that this is not a representative sampling. They got the volunteers that they got (less 21%).

How do they define child care? "Child care was defined as care by anyone other than the child’s mother that was regularly scheduled for at least 10 hours per week. This included care by fathers, grandparents and other relatives."

See, we are not blaming mothers here. But we are pointing out that care by mothers is fundamentally different than any other type of care, including care by fathers. ;-)

Read the report summary at the NIH website.

The researchers found that the correlation between high quality care and better vocabulary scores continued regardless of the amount of time the child had spent in child care or the type of care. The researchers wrote that this finding was consistent with other evidence indicating that children with greater early exposure to adult language were themselves more likely to score higher on measures of language development. However, child care quality was not associated with improved reading skills after 54 months of age.

The researchers also found that, as in the earlier grades, children with more experience in child care centers continued to show, through sixth grade, a greater frequency of what the researchers termed teacher-reported externalizing problem behavior.

Children who had been in center care in early childhood were more likely to score higher on teacher reports of aggression and disobedience. This was true regardless of the quality of the center-based care they received.

The researchers emphasized that the children’s behavior was within the normal range and were not considered clinically disordered.

The researchers are also careful to point out that their study can show correlations but cannot prove causality. (Correlation does not imply causality.) There was no control group. Children were not randomly assigned to child care centers; the families freely chose their own child care arrangements.

My interpretation of the report is that the negative effect (disruptive behavior) is very small in statistical significance compared to the large positive effect (increased vocabulary). The sample size is also quite small, not representative and uncontrolled.

Seriously, though, there is one fundamental flaw in this study. Because the families chose their own child care arrangements, there is likely an economic consideration that this report did not take into account. Families with only one child are more likely to use center-based child care.

High quality child care centers are simply too expensive for most families with more than one child. The disruptive behaviors described sound very similar to the behaviors more prevalent in only children.

I wouldn't worry too much about the effect of child care based on this study. So what if Iris is more likely, as a sixth grader, to be labeled disobedient and argumentative? When you tell her to jump, she looks at you like you are nuts. She takes nothing at face value and calls people on inconsistencies. Gee, I wonder where she gets that from.

Links
Sex, Lies and Statistics has nothing to do with child care, but I just like the title. It is also a good introduction to Bayesian statistics. I am an agnostic in the Bayesian wars. I think it is helpful sometimes, but often abused.

Fire is a river that runs uphill

Remember the "dreamscapes" homes featured in the Los Angeles Times' west magazine? When I asked what the four homes had in common besides killer views, no one guessed that the homes are all in harm's way.

The ocean view home in Pacific Palisades was built after the previous house slid down the hill. The Malibu home replaces one that burned down in 1993. The hilltop studio is just that, and situated amid a grove of oily, fire-prone eucalyptus trees. The Palm Springs house does not look like it is in imminent danger, but it is essentially a glass box sitting next to an active earthquake fault.

Years ago, I listened to a fire modeler from Los Alamos National Lab. The takeaway message from his talk was that fire is a river that runs uphill. On flat land, in the absence of winds, a fire will burn itself out after it has exhausted the fuels in the fire perimeter. To fight the fire, you need only create a firebreak which denies the fire of the fuel it needs to maintain itself.

Flames and hot embers rise. On a hill (still in the absence of winds), the fire will keep moving uphill, picking up fresh fuel, until it can climb no further. Living on a ridge line is doubly dangerous because you are in not one, but two firesheds. A mountain top compounds the danger even further. But that is where the killer views are.

Living below the ridgeline, say on the ocean side, is not a guarantee of safety. Strong winds (can you say Santa Ana?) can blow a wall of flames over so that it curves up and over mountain ridges.

After the LANL scientist had his say, I turned to the fire chief (of a major metropolitan city with many people living at the urban wild land interface) sitting next to me and asked, "Why do you give people building permits for those homes?". He replied that he didn't. He denies them the first time because they are unsafe.

But the people who have the financial resources to build those homes are not used to hearing no. They call their buddy, the mayor, and then the mayor calls to ask the fire chief to chew his hide. To save his job, he gives the rich and powerful what they want, even though he knows it is a bad idea.

It costs a lot of money to fight fires in those mountainous subdivisions. That cost is subsidized by people living in the flatlands with views of the apartment building 10 feet away. The fire chief doesn't want to expend his department's meager resources on defending yet another home deliberately put in harm's way. But he feels like he has no choice.

Similiarly, the land in Malibu has a habit of sliding away when it rains. Caltrans does a bang-up job, continuously clearing the rocks that fall on the Pacific Coast Highway so that the rich and powerful are not inconvenienced in their commute. (The same goes for "Devil's Slide" near San Francisco.) That is money that is not spent fixing potholes in the flatlands, home of plebian chumps.

Some will say that those people pay a lot of taxes for their expensive homes. That may be, but more taxes are paid in the flatlands simply because more people live there. Yet, the cost of providing services, on a per capita (or per dwelling unit) basis are disproportionately high for the extreme view neighborhoods.

Perhaps it is time we institute something like Boulder's "blue line". Above that line, you can build a home, but don't expect any city water or fire protection. That preserves personal freedom, but doesn't ask someone else to shoulder your risk. (Well, unless you count the insurance risk pool.)

Read Heat Invades Cool Heights Over Arizona Desert.

Since 1990, more than eight million homes have been built in Western areas that foresters call “the urban-wild land” interface, also the focus of recent federal firefighting efforts...

Last year, wildfires burned nearly 10 million acres in the United States — a record, surpassing the previous year. The Forest Service has become the fire service, devoting 42 percent of its budget to fire suppression last year — more than triple what it was in 1991.

One major reason that fire fighting in the western forests has become more expensive is the number of structures (homes) being built in the trees. One Colorado newspaper had the guts to run a story questioning if our firefighters should risk (or lose) their lives protecting the vacation homes of the rich after twelve firefighters died in the Storm King Mountain fire.

It is an issue of fairness. Why should poor and middle class people subsidize the requirement of the rich to have their views?

(Of course I am jealous. I would love to have a killer view and a glass house to frame those views. Alas, my scientist salary does not allow that anywhere within bicycle commuting distance of my job. Maybe I can paint a mural on the apartment building next door to improve my view.)

Addendum
The Hollywood Hills fire behaved just like a computer modeled fire!
Read Wildfire Weather to find out why I am so obsessed with wildfires.