ty to keep a personal life not exclusively concentrated on the infant (Chilman 451). Moreover, this opportunity avoids the scheduling of different work shifts for the two parents that could potentially bring to a loss of closeness in the relationship. For the child there is basically one advantage: the high quality services offer the right settings to start developing the right educational and social skills required to be academically and economically successful in the future. In fact, researchers reached the following conclusion talking about a study part of the federally funded Abecedarian Project, that involved 111 infants: Throughout their school years, the daycare group had higher IQ scores, better language skills and higher academic achievement than the other group. As adults, the children who received the intervention were more than twice as likely to attend college and be employed. (A boost 1) These results seem to be more evident on children living in poverty when compared to their peers enrolled in low quality daycare (NAP chap.3). Unfortunately, only very few infants belonging to that social class have the possibility to be enrolled in high quality services, because the trend is to use non-professional caregivers for cultural choice and economical constraint (NAP chap.2). The risk of coming across non-competent caregivers, like next-door babysitters or nurses without any degree or official targeted education, is indirectly the major disadvantage of choosing incautiously a day care program. In fact, these people very often use experience and common sense to take care of children, very often misunderstanding and underestimating their feelings (Leavitt 41). This problem is related to the fact that this kind of caregivers seem to be mostly concerned about childrens appropriate behavior rather than their real needs, and consequently they build in the infants a repression of expressing their true feelings and teach them to act like...
