Interesting SubStack Post about the Psychiatric Damage Caused by Early Childhood Daycare
Yesterday, I came across an interesting article about the possible long-term psychiatric damage from early childhood daycare. This article, originally posted as a guest post on Wesley Yang’s Substack, documents the rise of many previously rare mental illness and conditions in children and adolescents in western countries closely parallels the introduction and spread of early childhood daycare. The guest author, Laura Wiley Haynes, then goes into considerable detail about the close connection between rise of serious psychiatric issues in children and adoption of day care. She also provides some very interesting and highly plausible mechanisms for the effects we are seeing. I would highly recommend that you read the original post.
Here are a couple of excerpts:
By every objective measure, child mental health has gotten dramatically worse in the last few decades. Depression and anxiety, formerly rare in young children, have skyrocketed. In 1986, fewer than 2% of adolescents used a mental health service. Now, nearly a quarter of high school students have a diagnosable mental disorder. Lest we be tempted to blame this rise on better diagnosis or less stigma today, meta analyses can tease out incidence of depressive symptoms (such as sleeplessness, fatigue, isolation) in different eras, allowing a better grasp on actual rates of depression, not over/under-diagnosis. Meta analyses confirm a severe and worsening pediatric mental health crisis.
This modern surge in child distress— with more serious mental illnesses diagnosed at greater frequency and at younger ages— suggests a new kind of childhood trauma, harmful input, or epigenetically-damaging lack — something both widespread and profound, that is not being noticed. As morbid obesity and psychiatric meds now apply to grade schoolers, we must look further upstream for explanations. Of course, there is one radically-novel, now-fairly-commonplace experience of early life, which came into existence right before our children’s mental health fell off a cliff. In the mid 1980’s, America embraced center-based group daycare for babies under age one.
and
By comparing the Quebec children’s psychological and behavioral outcomes with age-matched peers in other provinces, and by comparing children in Quebec who began as newborns with their elder ‘siblings,' who started at older ages, discrete negative effects of early group care emerged, beginning with markedly higher aggression, anxiety and hyperactivity in daycare-exposed children by early elementary school (ages 5-9). These problems persisted: by older teens, “program exposure is associated with worsened health and life satisfaction, and increased rates of criminal activity. Increases in aggression and hyperactivity are concentrated in boys, as is the rise in the crime rates."
What do you think? Comments?