Temporary Care and its Effects - Psychology Unit 1

TEMPORARY CARE AND ITS EFFECTS

Institutionalisation: A process by which infants are cared for in an institution, other than the home, by caregivers, other than the mother and for a significant amount of time

What is the impact on the child?

Robertson and Robertson's short films seem to show that there are factors which make the separation of institutionalisation worse (e.g. length of separation, age at separation, multiple caregivers, unfamiliar environments, unsafe and scary experiences) and some factors which help reduce negative effects on institutionalisation (i.e. good quality of foster care, regular routines, familiar items and people, child's level of maturity, safe environment and experiences)

Day Care: A form of temporary care (i.e. not all day and night long), not given by family members or someone well known to the child and usually outside of the home. It includes child-minding and day nurseries. Does not include fostering, community homes or hospitals

Positive Effects of Day Care

Anderson (1989, 1992): Carried out several studies in Sweden and found that children who attended day care were better able to get on with their playmates than children who had not. These studies were on high population validity as they used big numbers participants

Clarke-Stewart (1991): Another study also found that children who attended nurseries had better social development than in children who were looked at family settings

Field et al (1998): Compared pro social skills of children who attended day care full-time to those who attended part time. They found that full-time attenders played more cooperatively

Borge et al (2004): Used material questionnaires rating children’s behaviours and found aggression to be rated more highly in home-reared children. However, this relies on self-reporting which is notoriously vulnerable to social desirability effects.

Negative Effects of Day Care

Belsky (2006): Children in daycare showed higher levels of aggression than children who didn't

Maccoby and Lewis (2003): More hours spent in daycare correlated with more aggressive behaviours at school

Problems with Research Methodology

There are such contradictory findings about childcare and aggression, this could be to do with the range of different measures and methods used by the…