Is Daycare Bad for Babies? What the Research Actually Says
“Daycare is terrible for children. Absolutely terrible for children.”
That’s a statement made over and over by psychotherapist and author Erica Komisar, and it’s the kind of statement that gets a mother’s attention.
Especially a mother standing in her kitchen at 7:30 in the morning, packing bottles into a daycare bag while simultaneously wondering whether returning to work is somehow harming her baby.
I’ve spent more than 20 years working in maternal mental health, and I want to say something very clearly:
The research does not support the conclusion that daycare is “terrible for children.”
What the research tells us is far more nuanced. And that nuance matters because mothers deserve accurate information about what actually supports healthy development.
Yes, the first three years matter
Let’s begin with something I suspect Erica Komisar and I would agree on: the first three years of life are enormously important.
Babies are developing rapidly during this period. Their brains and nervous systems are shaped through repeated experiences with the people around them. Attachment, responsive caregiving, consistency, being comforted when distressed, and having adults who notice a child’s signals and respond to them all matters.
Children need relationships in which they repeatedly experience: When I need you, you are available to me.
None of this is controversial. Where I believe we need to be much more careful is what we conclude from it.
The fact that young children need responsive, consistent relationships does not mean that their biological mother must provide all of that care herself, all day, every day, for the first three years of life.
Those are two very different claims.
What does the research on daycare and attachment actually show?
One of the most important bodies of research on this question comes from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, a large longitudinal study that followed more than 1,000 children beginning in infancy.
Researchers examined characteristics of childcare including the amount of time children spent in care, the quality of that care, the age at which they entered care, the type of care they received, and the stability of their childcare arrangements.
When researchers looked at infant-mother attachment, childcare itself did not independently predict whether a child developed a secure attachment to their mother.
Maternal sensitivity and responsiveness did.
There was important nuance: when lower maternal sensitivity occurred alongside poorer-quality care, extensive hours, or multiple childcare arrangements, the likelihood of insecure attachment increased. That is worth paying attention to. But notice how different that finding is from: Daycare is terrible for children.
The research points us toward context, relationships, quality of care, and the interaction between multiple factors, not a simple division between children who attend daycare and children who do not.
What about cortisol?
Another claim often made in conversations about daycare is that children in group childcare can have higher cortisol levels.
There is research behind this. Some studies have found that, particularly among toddlers and preschool-aged children, cortisol can rise across the childcare day, whereas it tends to decline across the day when children are at home.
We should be curious about that. But we also need to understand what cortisol tells us—and what it doesn’t.
Cortisol is part of the body’s normal stress-response system. An increase in cortisol is not synonymous with toxic stress, neurological damage, or evidence that a child’s attachment system has been harmed.
Children experience physiological activation for many reasons. The meaning of that activation depends on its intensity, duration, frequency, context, and the availability of supportive relationships.
So the finding “cortisol can rise during a childcare day” deserves attention. But it does not scientifically translate into “daycare damages children.”
Quantity matters. So does quality.
There are also studies finding associations between greater amounts of childcare and small differences in some behavioral outcomes. Again, those findings shouldn’t be dismissed, but they need context.
In the large NICHD research, children who spent more time in childcare sometimes demonstrated somewhat more assertive, noncompliant, or aggressive behavior. It’s important to note, though, that the overwhelming majority of those children were still within the normal range of behavior.
Other research has found that higher-quality early childhood education and care is associated with small improvements in academic, behavioral, social, and emotional outcomes. And children can form meaningful, secure relationships with nonparental caregivers.
Taken together, this doesn’t give us a satisfying internet headline. It gives us something more useful: Child development is shaped by an ecosystem.
The child matters. The parents matter. The caregiving relationships matter. The quality and consistency of childcare matter. The amount of time spent in care may matter. The environment at home matters. The stressors facing the family matter.
And these factors all interact with one another.
And then there is the mother
This is the part of the conversation I believe gets left out far too often.
When we talk about what babies need, we sometimes speak as though the mother herself is simply part of the developmental equipment—as though the only relevant question is how many hours of access her child has to her.
But mothers are human beings and their mental health, relationships, financial security, and sense of identity and purpose matters. And yes, for some women, meaningful work matters enormously.
Some mothers genuinely want to spend the early years of their children’s lives at home. I want us to create policies, communities, and economic structures that make that choice more possible.
Other mothers need to work financially. And some mothers want to work. They love their children fiercely and also feel energized, purposeful, creative, connected, or deeply themselves through their work. I want us to support those women too.
The wellbeing of the mother is part of the developmental environment in which a child grows.
We cannot have a serious conversation about child wellbeing while treating maternal wellbeing as irrelevant.
This isn’t an argument for putting every baby in daycare
It is also not an argument that all childcare is equally good. It isn’t. Important considerations like quality, ratios, consistency of caregivers, responsiveness, emotional climate of the setting matters, and the individual temperament and needs of the child are all important.
Obviously, our policies matter, too. I believe we should advocate fiercely for generous paid parental leave, affordable high-quality childcare, flexible workplaces, reasonable working hours, and cultures that allow parents to actually be present with their children. Those are developmental issues. They are also maternal mental health issues.
But advocating for better support for families is very different from telling mothers that putting their children in childcare is inherently harmful.
We need a better question
For decades, mothers have been handed false binaries.
Career or children.
Ambition or attachment.
Work or presence.
Good mother or selfish mother.
The science doesn’t require us to think this way. A woman does not have to choose between being deeply engaged in meaningful work and raising emotionally healthy, securely attached children. But doing both well does require us to understand much more accurately what children and what mothers need.
So instead of asking: Is daycare good or bad?
I think we should be asking: What combination of care, connection, work, support, and family life allows this particular child and this particular family to thrive?
That question is harder because it doesn’t fit neatly into a seven-second social media clip.
But it gets us much closer to what the research actually says, and much closer to the kind of conversation mothers deserve.
