Penn and Teller Strike :)

A.J. most people in the US think like your friend does, however I disagree in that I believe that there should be a two parent family with at least one of the parents staying home with the kids untill they are school age...not a popular stnad I know....but absent this ideal situation single parent families usually do not have this luxury.

[Aelia Jusa]

Originally posted by MagiK: A.J. most people in the US think like your friend does, however I disagree in that I believe that there should be a two parent family with at least one of the parents staying home with the kids untill they are school age...not a popular stnad I know....but absent this ideal situation single parent families usually do not have this luxury.

Well staying home with a (good) parent probably is the best scenario for pre-school age kids. And my lecturer wouldn't disagree with you there . However there's a lot of popular opinion that all daycare is detrimental to children's development, and that simply isn't supported by the research. There has been a bank of strong longitudinal studies by the NICHD in the past few years with extremely large samples and a wide variety of daycare situations, that have found that simply going to daycare isn't a predictor of poor outcomes for children - the quality of the care, proportion of children to carers, quality of homelife, parent's own behaviour and their attidutes to daycare, and the children's own attributes all contribute to whether the daycare is detrimental or not.

However the point of my post wasn't to talk about daycare. I was noting that so-called expert opinion in the media may not reflect actual findings at all, or at least only present one side of the argument, and that my lecturer is first-hand evidence that newspapers will choose what they report and find people that back it up, ignoring those who don't.