Mom-child relations withstand day care

 Regular child care provided outside the home or by someone other than the mother does not in itself undermine healthy emotional connections between mothers and their 15-month-old infants, according to a long-term national study. The finding holds even if care begins during the first 3 months after birth and runs for 30 hours or more per week, investigators contend.

 Among infants who receive insensitive, unresponsive care from their mothers, however, the mother-child relationship takes a hit from low-quality child care, 10 or more hours per week of child care, or several shifts from one nonmaternal arrangement to another.

"This study helps us tease apart complexities regarding child care that have not previously been assessed," contends Jay Belsky, a psychologist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park and one of 25 scientists at 14 universities nationwide involved in the ongoing project. "But the jury is still out on the long-term effects of child care on development."

 Belsky and several of his colleagues announced their findings last week at the International Conference on Infant Studies in Providence, R.I.

 The investigation consists of 1,153 children and their families living in or near Boston, Little Rock, Seattle, and seven other locales. The youngsters, no more than 1 month old when they entered the study in 1991, will be tracked until age 7 years.

 Experimenters administered questionnaires to mothers in their homes and videotaped them interacting with their kids at ages 1, 6, and 15 months. Independent observers rated the quality of each mother's child care efforts and noted infant irritability and other "difficult" temperamental traits.

 At 15 months, infants completed a procedure in the laboratory during which their mothers left them alone in a room for a few minutes. Researchers theorize that a "securely attached" infant calms down and reestablishes contact with its mother after a brief separation, while an "insecurely attached" infant either ignores and avoids her or shows no signs of reassurance upon her return.

 Unlike most previous studies, this one allows researchers to control statistically for each mother's personality traits, her adeptness at child rearing, and other important family influences before evaluating child care's contribution to infant attachment, asserts study coauthor Sarah Friedman of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in Bethesda, Md. NICHD funds and coordinates the project.

 After taking family factors into account, Friedman states, researchers found no relation between infants' attachment security and type of child care, quality of care, number of hours per week in care, number of child care arrangements experienced, or age of entry into care--with one exception. Infants with insensitive, unresponsive mothers more often showed insecure attachment when given poor quality or large quantities of child care, she holds.

 Boys who spent more than 30 hours per week in child care exhibited slightly more insecure attachment than other boys. In contrast, girls who spent 10 or fewer hours per week in child care showed a modest rise in insecure attachment.

 Boys may react more negatively to their mother's extended absence than girls, asserts Eleanor Maccoby, a psychologist at Stanford University. Yet evidence suggesting that girls benefit emotionally from maternal separation probably will not hold up in analyses of children at later ages, Maccoby argues.

 Quality of child care may assume much more importance when researchers conduct future examinations of kids' social, language, and cognitive skills, she adds.