Abstract
Recently, infant day care has received considerable attention among researchers and public-policy advocates. This interest has focused mainly on the growing body of research on the effects of infant day care in terms of mother/child attachment. Relatively little work has examined differences in specific features of caregiving experienced by day care and home-reared infants. In the present study, adult/child interaction patterns were studied in a sample of 54 infants (36 home-reared, 18 day care) at 12 months of age. Differences between the groups were also assessed using outcome measures for cognitive and motivational competence. When mother/child interaction was compared in the home-reared and day care samples, very little difference was found in quality of interaction with the difference favoring the mothers of the day care infants. However, mothers in the day care sample had significantly higher quality interaction patterns with their infants than the day care providers with those same infants. Regarding child outcome, no differences were found between the home-reared and day care groups in exploratory competence, problem-solving ability, or mastery motivation. Several potential explanations for these findings are discussed.
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