The idea of liberating parents is an attractive one. And the idea of all children, regardless of parental income, playing and learning together from just after birth is a pleasant one. Yet there is a problem. The best evidence on the impact of free (or almost free) universal from-birth child care indicates that it can harm children.
How can this be? There is, after all, lots of evidence—in the form of small, randomised controlled trials—in support of similar schemes. The most influential trial began in 1962 when a group of three-year-old children in Ypsilanti, a small city near Detroit, were enrolled in a programme at Perry Elementary School. The organisers found children who lived in poor households and struggled in tests, and then either enrolled them or put them in a control group. For the next two years, those enrolled attended a daily two-and-a-half-hour pre-school programme, where they “planned”, “did” and “reviewed” play activities in groups of five or six. A teacher also visited them at home once a week.
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This shift in Quebec, but not in the rest of Canada, is about as good an experiment in how such a policy affects children as it is possible to find. To work out its impact, Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michael Baker of the University of Toronto and Kevin Milligan of the University of British Columbia tapped into a wealth of data on children in Quebec collected by the National Longitudinal Study of Children and Youth, which gathers details on child care, teacher evaluations, test scores and behaviour reports.
The trio published their first study in 2005, and the results were damning. Shifting to universal child care appeared to lead to a rise in aggression, anxiety and hyperactivity among Quebecer children, as well as a fall in motor and social skills. The effects were large: anxiety rates doubled; roughly a third more kids were reported to be hyperactive. Indeed, the difference in hyperactivity rates was larger than is typically reported between boys and girls.
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