A mother's bond with her child is far more crucial to a child's development than whether both parents work outside the home, new US research has found.
The US research was described yesterday as highly significant by Dr Maureen Gaffney, clinical psychologist and chairwoman of the National Economic and Social Forum.
"Irrespective of how many hours your children spend in childcare, irrespective of the type of childcare . . . it does not affect the quality of the child's security with the mother," she said on RTÉ's Marian Finucane Show.
The findings come from one of a number of associated childcare studies just released in the US.
A study led by Dr Aletha Huston at the University of Texas, Austin, found quality of time spent with a baby, and not the quantity, guided a toddler's social and intellectual development up to the age of three.
Dr Huston's team studied the daily schedules of 1,053 mothers, visited the homes and watched videotaped observations of the mothers' interaction with their babies
They found that mothers working outside the home spent more time with their babies than expected and tended to compensate at the weekends for absences during the week.
Stay-at-home mothers spent an average of 146 minutes in social interaction with their babies on a given weekday, whereas working mothers spent almost 90. At the weekend, working mothers spent more time in social interaction with their babies than nonworking mothers.
Dr Huston is also involved in one of the largest studies of childcare in the US. The National Centre for Early Development and Learning at the University of North Carolina has been leading a study of the development of children since they were born in the early 1990s. It involves 1,364 families in 10 different areas.
Earlier findings from this study showed higher quality childcare was associated with better pre-academic skills and language performance. But children in childcare for more than 30 hours a week were more likely to show behavioural problems such as aggression and defiance at pre-school age.
The latest findings showed that such behavioural problems were not as apparent by the time the children reached the age of about eight.
Meanwhile, a survey by the www.rollercoaster.ie parents' website has found 40 per cent of 286 parents who responded to a poll believe it is not worth their while to work outside home because of high childcare costs.
The website found more than a third of parents who responded were dissatisfied with childcare quality and one in four parents had changed their childcare arrangements at least once because of this.
Of those who responded to the poll, over half were spending more than €150 per week on childcare.
A working mother with three children said she was paying €24,000 per annum on childcare. Some 97 per cent said there was not enough Government support in childcare.
