Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

If you read the media in Canada there would seem to be popular support for a universal daycare program. Proponents of such a program frequently point to a Statistics Canada study that indicated that day care was better than parents. Rarely do those people note that the actual study placed conditions on that statement:

A study released yesterday by Statistics Canada claims that "children who are enrolled in early childhood programs and day-care centres appear to get a head start in school over youngsters who stay at home with a parent." The study says that the effect was noted only until the first grade and not thereafter. Improvements of day care over parent care were reported in reading, writing, mathematics and overall achievement. The findings are highly suspect firstly since they coincide perfectly with the current Liberal government push for universal day care.

While the study claims to have controlled for education of the child's mother and the income of the household, it did not take into account the reading that any stay-at-home parents gave to their children. Moreover the results for the stay-at-home parents are accompanied in the study by the phrase, "These estimates should be used with caution due to small sample sizes."

Today the New York Timespublished the results of a much more comprehensive study:

A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade.

The effect was slight, and well within the normal range for healthy children, the researchers found. And as expected, parents’ guidance and their genes had by far the strongest influence on how children behaved.

So parents do still matter.Daycare supporters seem to suggest that only daycare workers are capable of raising children; that parents shouldn't be trusted with the task. Yet before day care existed people did this every day. I didn't attend day care and I'm ok. My kids didn't attend day care and they appear to have turned out fine.

There will always be people who shouldn't be parents. On the whole though, parents are always the best ones to raise their own children.The suggestion that universal day care will somehow be better than parents in every care is just ridiculous.