Trends in Child Development Research Important to Day-Care Policy

Abstract

Themes in child development literature from the 1940s to the present need to be examined critically with respect to maternal employment in the context of changing social values. Several approaches to empirical and child development behavioral research are examined for their relevance to day-care policy. The child development research reviewed herein appears to support the principle that a child's development can best proceed out of the matrix of mother-provided care. Three different theoretical perspectives are reviewed historically in order to examine research biases and their consequences in establishing a theoretical rationale for day-care policy: the maternal deprivation literature of the 1940s and 1950s, the application of cognitive theory to early childhood education via the Head Start Program of the 1960s, and the psychoanalytic studies of Margaret Mahler on the early mother-child relationship in the 1970s.