What the evidence says about whether we should send kids to childcare

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When I sent my daughter to childcare, it felt like a personal failing: like I couldn’t be bothered to look after her. So I try to limit her hours as much as I can. I still feel guilty.

Is childcare good for kids?Credit: Ryan Stuart

That idea, I suspect, is widespread: that parent-child relationships are the best way to help children develop, and anything else is second-best.

But it turns out there is a gulf between how we think about childcare and what the evidence says.

High-quality childcare is good for kids, experts say. More is probably better.

Indeed, the childcare systems with the best outcomes for kids are run by the Nordic countries – where the expectation is that kids will be in childcare full-time from a young age, says Dr Dan Cloney, senior research fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research.

When childcare is high-quality, “you could be in seven days a week, you’d be doing really well,” says Professor Karen Thorpe, head of child development at the Queensland Brain Institute.

Should I send my kid to childcare?

There are a bunch of good reasons parents send their kids to childcare. We’ll focus just on child development.

When your child is younger than one, the “ideal circumstance” is keeping your baby at home to maximise the ability to breastfeed and bond with parents, says Thorpe. But Australia offers only 5½ months of paid parental leave, leaving many parents unable to make that choice, a sad systemic failure, Thorpe adds.

Historically – and currently, in many parts of the world – childcare was done by a group of adults – relatives, but also extended friendship networks.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited Merri Community Child Care and Kindergarten in Thornbury to speak about changes to the childcare subsidy in June 2023.Credit: Paul Jeffers

“It takes a village is absolutely correct,” says Thorpe.

With the exception of breastfeeding, the evidence does not suggest children do best when cared for exclusively by their parents.

“Childcare is our new village,” she says.

In animal studies, mice pups develop just as well if given to a surrogate mother, so long as she provides high-quality care, says Thorpe.

In 2006-07, Queensland cancelled its state-funded kindergarten program – cutting childcare attendance from 100 per cent to 26 per cent. School readiness, test scores and behavioural scores all dropped.

A review of the evidence by the Australian Institute for Health and Welfare (AIHW) in 2015 concluded that children under three in high-quality care, in general, academically outperform their peers who do not attend childcare.

A 2024 Productivity Commission review came to similar conclusions: there’s extensive evidence childcare improves children’s cognitive outcomes, test scores and school readiness, and there’s no robust evidence it makes their behaviour worse.

Importantly, these benefits seem sustained. Kids who attend childcare – even a bit – seem to outperform kids who do not – all the way up to grade 5, when they are 10.

Is the difference big or small? How much does childcare matter? Quite a lot – as much as the effect of poverty or parenting quality, per the AIHW.

So parenting matters, but good childcare can improve a child’s development, says Professor Sheila Degotardi, director of the Centre for Research In Early Childhood Education.

The idea the absolute best place for a child is at home, with their parents, is “an over-romanticised view, frankly. Children are very, very capable of forming very strong relationships outside the family home.”

Our focus on small family groups – parents and children – is “a bit weird, frankly. It’s just not the case in other cultures,” she says.

Benefits from childcare are not just for kids from low socioeconomic backgrounds – wealthy kids get significant benefits too.

Some prior research has raised concern that childcare might be bad for kids’ behaviour. But the Productivity Commission does not buy it. Why? Because parents of kids who have more challenging behaviour are more likely to send them to childcare earlier – maybe because they need a break.

So let’s say you agree to send your kid to childcare. How many days is too much?

The answer: if quality is high, there does not seem to be an effect. Highly effective childcare programs in Japan and Spain enrol kids nine-to-five for five days a week. The evidence probably skews towards more hours being better for kids older than one.

Quality over quantity

So quantity matters – just not in the way we’d expect. And quality matters a lot.

Quebec is a case in point. It dramatically expanded its childcare program in 1997 – but that led to negative development outcomes for kids. Why? Probably because the sudden expansion, driven by profit-seeking centres, also led to a nosedive in quality.

The core point here: simply supervising a child while they play with toys is not enough. To develop best, children need lots of interaction with adults: talking, playing, reading, singing. “The more interactions you get, to-and-fro, the more it builds the structures of the brain,” says Thorpe.

The government issues childcare quality rankings; 68 per cent meet national quality standards, and 22 per cent exceed them.

A new paper led by Thorpe shows that really matters. “The kids in exceeding centres are doing much better across the board,” she says. “Really, the standard exceeding, should be the standard – because that’s when we see a really good outcome for children.”

Does equity matter?

So high-quality childcare is good for kids, and more is probably better.

But childcare also allows mothers to return to the workforce – and that’s probably good for kids too.

This turns out to have effects on children. First, parents often end up with more money, and we know wealth strongly improves child development. But we also see parents with kids in care actually spend more quality time with them at home.

“Allowing parents to parent less can allow them to parent better,” the Productivity Commission says.

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