Childcare from non-family members ends up producing more aggressivechildren

Children with non family caregivers

Children who spend their early years in childcare groups rather than with their mothers or relatives are apt to be more aggressive than those who have care from those they know or who are close to them.


According to a new research study at the University of Illinois, those children who spend more than 30 hours weekly in childcare under the supervision of an unrelated individual may be exposed to an environment where they learn aggressive tactics.

This information was discovered by two professors, Philip Rodkin and Glenn Roisman, both psychology professors, who studied more than 1000 children to learn about the behavior of children in certain childcare situations.

“Aggression can be popular if you’re in an aggressive situation – and unpopular if you’re not,” Rodkin said.

But were these more aggressive children also smarter and able to succeed because of their assertiveness.  Rodkin and Roisman hypothesizes about
this as well.

“One of the reasons that we wanted to do this study was that we wanted to understand the kinds of conditions under which these characteristics co-occur,” Roisman said. “Our quest to understand these individuals wound up leading us back to child care as the explanation.”

Roisman is a co-principal investigator on the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, an ongoing study that has tracked more than 1,000 children since they were infants and were interviewed both at home and in 10 university laboratories. Both cognitive and behavioral areas were examined along with researchers obtaining teacher and parent ratings.

Researchers found that tough, aggressive children, who developed these characteristics in childcare relationships, had mothers less sensitive to their needs, social skills not as effective as other children and had lower levels of cognitive functioning as well.


When these tough children reach the sixth grade, they “may have enduring patterns of peer aggression, possibly influencing other children toward antisocial behavior as well,” Rodkin and Roisman maintain.

“What we think is going on with popular-aggressive kids is that in the peer context of early childhood there may be high levels of aggression and not very directive socialization on caregivers’ parts, so that aggression becomes popular by virtue of children’s interactions with one another,” Rodkin said. “There is evidence from other studies indicating that aggression is socially contagious, and that once you ‘catch’ aggressive behavior patterns, they can endure, even after the original setting is no longer present.”

The children, now age 18, have been recently evaluated and will be again in their early 20's.

“One question that remains is how popular-aggressive kids fare when they transition to college or work roles,” Roisman said. “Whether this is an approach to dealing with their peers that ultimately serves them well or not is totally unclear on the basis of these data.”

“Will they become CEOs because they have this ruthless aggression coupled with social regard?” Rodkin said. “Or they do turn out to be like other aggressive kids, who are clearly on a negative trajectory? Our guess is that they are probably are not the Donald Trumps of tomorrow because they lack resources such as high cognitive functioning and maternal sensitivity during childhood that would enable them to excel.”