Outline and Evaluate Research Into the Effects of Day-Care on Social Develpment.

Outline and evaluate research into the effects of day care on social development (e.g. aggression and peer relations)

Quality of day-care had an effect of social development. However this is down to huge numbers of children entering day-care. Consequently in many nurseries there isn’t a decent sized ratio of children to staff. For example a decent sized ratio would be 1:3 1 carer to 3 children.

This shows that if there aren’t enough carers per how many children there are, the children might not get the care that they need or require, for example making sure that they have been to the bathroom, washed their hands before eating making sure that they have their coats when playing outside.

These are the minimum that a carer should do when looking after children.

Leach’s study proves that day-care can have a negative effect on the child’s social development. Leach found that children who spend more time with their parents are better mentally and socially developed than children who were sent to day-care. Therefore this shows that sending your child to day-care can have a negative effect on the development of your child.

In contrast to Leach’s theory Anderson sais that sending your child to day-care before 12 months of age, has a positive effect on social and emotional development, she followed children ages 8-13 who had entered day-care before 12 months and found that they had better peer relations. Anderson’s theory has high amounts if validity because she has used the same children who entered day-care and assessed them at the ages of 8 and 13 and found they had better peer relations.

Although the amount of time that a child spends in day-care could be a factor.
Sammons et al indicates that there is a slight chance of increased antisocial behaviour when children spend more than 20 hours a week in day-care and the risk increases noticeably when they spend more than 40 hours a week in day-care. This shows us that the more time the child is away from...