ABSTRACT
The increasing number of children attending child care during their preschool years has prompted developmental psychologists to study closely the effects of such arrangements on children’s development. Concerns about the effects of day care spring from a generalization of Bowlby’s (1969) theory of maternal deprivation that was originally proposed to define and explain the effects of more permanent separation. It was argued that the daily separation from the mother will render the child’s attachment bonds to his or her mother insecure. Furthermore, it was feared that the intellectual stimulation that the child receives when he or she had to share the attention of one adult with peers would be diluted compared with the stimulation obtained at home with the mother. The voluminous research literature has been well reviewed by Belsky and Steinberg (1978), Clarke-Stewart and Fein (1983), and Provost (1980).
