Cultural variations in infant care are vast. No theory directly endorses any particular caregiving practice, but each of these theories has been used to justify radically different responses. This is particularly obvious in infant day care, a topic on which developmentalists disagree.

For ideological as well as economic reasons, center-based infant care is common in France, Israel, China, Norway, and Sweden, where it is heavily subsidized by the government. Many families in those nations consider that the government’s provision of quality center care is a public obligation, in the same way that people assume that the public fire department will extinguish fires everywhere in the city.

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Center care is scarce in South Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where many parents believe it would be harmful to infants’ well-being. (Table 4.3 lists five essential characteristics of high-quality infant day care, wherever it may be located.)

It is estimated that about 134 million babies will be born each year from 2010 to 2021 (United Nations, 2013). Most newborns are cared for primarily or exclusively by their mothers. Allocare, especially by the father and grandmother, increases as the baby gets older. Daily care by a nonrelative, trained and paid to provide it, occurs for only about 15 percent of infants worldwide, a statistic that obscures the range from one culture to another.

As discussed above, fathers worldwide increasingly take part in baby care, but some cultures still expect fathers to stay at a distance. Others favor equality (Shwalb et al., 2013). Most nations provide some paid leave for mothers who are in the workforce; some also provide paid leave for fathers; and several nations provide paid family leave that can be taken by either parent or shared between them.

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The length of paid leave varies from a few days to about 15 months (see Figure 4.3). Those variations affect infant care, since an employee who loses money and a job is likely to go back to work as soon as possible after a baby is born.

The other crucial variable is whether day care is free, subsidized, or paid entirely by parents. When most child care is privately funded, quality varies a great deal. That makes it difficult to generalize about the effects of infant day care, since some day care is so much better than others.

NORTH AMERICA Only 20 percent of infants in the United States are cared for exclusively by their mothers (i.e., no other relatives or babysitters) throughout their first year. This is in contrast to Canada, which is similar to the United States in ethnic diversity but has far more generous maternal leave and lower rates of maternal employment.

In the first year of life, most Canadians are cared for only by their mothers (Babchishin et al., 2013). Obviously, these differences are affected by culture, economics, and politics more than by any universal needs of babies.

In the United States, some agencies send professional visitors to the homes of new parents, advising them about baby care. Mixed results come from such efforts—some mothers are suspicious, resistant, or overwhelmed (Paulsell et al., 2014). Similarly, grandmother care, informal care, and center care have each sometimes been destructive.

Grandmother care seems particularly complex, as grandmothers vary in personality, competence, and dedication. For example, in most nations and centuries, infants were more likely to survive if their grandmothers were nearby, especially when they were newly weaned (Sear & Mace, 2008). The hypothesis is that grandmothers provided essential nourishment and protection. But in one era (northern Germany, 1720–1874), living with a paternal grandmother (not a maternal one) increased the rate of newborn death (Beise & Voland, 2002).

Mixed evidence can also be found for center care. Although all the research finds that cognitive development benefits from infant day care, several studies have suggested that children in early, extensive center care are somewhat more likely to develop externalizing problems by age 5—hitting, yelling, and disobeying adults. Later development is affected as well. In the United States, adolescents who experienced extensive day care are more impulsive and risk-taking, although maternal sensitivity moderates that tendency (Burchinal et al., 2014). The following further describes some of the research.

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The link between infant day care and later psychosocial problems, although not found in every study, raises concern. For that reason, a large study in Norway is particularly interesting, as is recent research from Australia.

NORWAY In Norway, new mothers are paid at full salary to stay home with their babies for 47 weeks, and high-quality, free center day care is available from age 1 on. Most (62 percent) Norwegian 1-year-olds are in center care, as are 84 percent of 2-year-olds and 93 percent of 3-year-olds. By contrast, in the United States maternal leave is unpaid, and if the mother does not return to work after 3 months, her job may be terminated. Infant care is usually privately financed, which may reduce quality for all but the wealthy.

In the United States, reliable statistics are not kept on center care for infants, but only 42 percent of all U.S. 3-year-olds were in educational programs in 2012, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (Kena et al., 2014). Rates increase slightly as maternal education rises, because mothers with more education are more likely to appreciate and afford early education.

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Longitudinal results in Norway find no detrimental results of infant center care that begins at age 1. (Too few children were in center care before their first birthday to find significant longitudinal results.) By kindergarten, Norwegian children in day care had slightly more conflicts with caregivers, but the authors suggest that may be the result of shy children becoming bolder as a result of day care (Solheim et al., 2013).

AUSTRALIA The attitudes of the culture and the mothers may influence the child. An intriguing example comes from Australia, where the government has recently attempted to increase the birth rate. Parents were given $5,000 for each newborn, parental leave is paid, and public subsidies provide child-care centers. The law endorses the concept that young children benefit from interactions with other children and learn from skilled caregivers, yet many Australians contend that babies need exclusive maternal care (Harrison et al., 2014). As you might imagine, each side claims support from psychology: behaviorism versus psychoanalytic theory.

Parents are caught in the middle. For example, one Australian mother of a 12-month-old boy chose center care, but said:

I spend a lot of time talking with them about his day and what he’s been doing and how he’s feeling and they just seem to have time to do that, to make the effort to communicate. Yeah they’ve really bonded with him and he’s got close to them. But I still don’t like leaving him there. And he doesn’t, to be honest … Because he’s used to sort of having, you know, parents.

[quoted in Boyd et al., 2013]

Developmentalists agree that both home quality and national context matter for infants. There is no agreed-upon setting for ideal infant psychosocial development, as long as people provide love, language, and play that are responsive to the baby. As one review explained: “This evidence now indicates that early nonparental care environments sometimes pose risks to young children and sometimes confer benefits” (Phillips et al., 2011, p. 44). The same can be said for parental care: Some provide excellent care; some do not.

Many people believe that the practices of their own family or culture are best and that other patterns harm either the infant or the mother. This is another example of the difference-equals-deficit error. Without evidence, assumptions flourish.

No matter what form of care is chosen or what theory is endorsed, individualized care with stable caregivers seems best (Morrissey, 2009). Caregiver change is especially problematic for infants because each simple gesture or sound that a baby makes not only merits an encouraging response but also requires interpretation by someone who knows that particular baby well.

For example, “baba” could mean bottle, baby, blanket, banana, or some other word that does not even begin with b. This example is an easy one, but similar communication efforts—requiring individualized emotional responses, preferably from a familiar caregiver—are evident even in the first smiles and cries.

A related issue is the growing diversity of baby care providers. Especially when the home language is not the majority language, parents hesitate to let people of another background care for their infants. That is one reason that, in the United States, immigrant parents often prefer care by relatives instead of by professionals (P. Miller et al., 2014). Relationships are crucial, not only between caregiver and infant but also between caregiver and parent (Elicker et al., 2014).

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Particularly problematic is instability of nonmaternal care, as when an infant is cared for by a neighbor, a grandmother, a center, and then another grandmother, each for only a month or two. By age 3, children with unstable care histories are likely to be more aggressive than those with stable nonmaternal care, such as being at the same center with the same caregiver for years (Pilarz & Hill, 2014).

As is true of many topics in child development, questions remain. But one fact is without question: Each infant needs personal responsiveness. Someone should serve as a partner in the synchrony duet, a base for secure attachment, and a social reference who encourages exploration. Then infant emotions and experiences—cries and laughter, fears and joys—will ensure that psychosocial development goes well.