The side doors of Columbia Baptist Church swing open at 7:30 each weekday morning, and a parade of parents and preschoolers files in on its way to day care.

Until 8:30, when their teachers arrive, the children are free to play in two brightly lit rooms filled with Tinker Toys, blocks, a slide and seesaw. Clustered around one table, three-and four-year-old girls are absorbed in drawing pictures of hearts. Brian explains to the boys at his table that he wants to be Darth Vader next Halloween. And Sarah, two-and-a-half, one of the youngest children Columbia accepts into day care, is quiet and sticks close to the adults.

Janice Engels, the church’s director of children’s ministries and day care overseer, emphasizes individual care and loving concern. “We try very hard to create a family atmosphere,” she said, where the children feel they are “back with their brothers and sisters” when they arrive each morning.

According to child-care experts, local churches—like Columbia in Falls Church, Virginia—are the leading providers of day care. Amy Wilkins of the Children’s Defense Fund says there are 18,000 church-based centers, about half of which operate as church ministries. The others, she said, are run by outsiders using church facilities.

Many, like Columbia, are licensed only to care for children past infancy (over two years of age). Yet the fastest-growing segment of America’s work force consists of mothers with children under three years of age. In 1970, 24 percent of the mothers of infants worked outside the home. By 1984, that number had reached 46 percent. Infants as young as three weeks old are spending a large portion of their lives cared for by someone other than their mothers.

According to Jay Belsky, associate professor of human development at Pennsylvania State University, “The research evidence is compellingly consistent in demonstrating there is absolutely no adverse effect of out-of-home care, be it in centers or in families, on children’s intellectual functioning.” But the picture is different, he notes, when we look at children’s emotional development or what is defined as the quality of the infant’s emotional bond with the mother.

Testifying before a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on child care services (Sept. 6, 1984), Belsky said, “Today I cannot conclude, as I did in 1978 and again in 1982, that the data show no apparent adverse effects on infant care.”

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A Church Dilemma

While day-care ministries began as simple responses to clear-cut needs, the impact of “other-than-mother” child care has presented the church with a dilemma it is ill-prepared to face. At Columbia Baptist Church, where a well-established center has served more than 1,200 children in 16 years, pastor Neal Jones summed up the day-care challenge by saying that “there is the temptation for the church to take on cultural values, but also the temptation exists to do nothing.”

To date, few churches or denominations have grappled with the implications of the psychological research on day care. When Churches Mind the Children, a study of day care in local congregations affiliated with the National Council of Churches (NCC), states that day care arose in the church as a “grass roots phenomenon.” It was a local response to a local need. One of the study’s authors, Eileen Lindner, says NCC churches did not consciously decide to become providers of child care; instead, many saw day care as a way of ministering to the local community.

Churches affiliated with the more conservative National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) have also been concerned with meeting human needs. But, according to Ted Ward, dean of international studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and an expert on the family, these same churches, when faced with need, rarely make policy decisions. Instead, they respond in the manner of the Good Samaritan.

Few NAE-member denominations have an official position on day care. Instead, they leave the issue up to the individual local churches. Charles Beekley, head of Christian education for the Brethren Church, says, “We can formulate and postulate all we want, but each church is responsible for its own program.”

Ted Johnson, secretary of educational ministries for the Baptist General Conference, said there is no definitive stand on day care guiding its 732 affiliated churches. And former Assemblies of God president Thomas Zimmerman said, “We really don’t have a position on day care. Our form of government leaves that more or less a matter for the local church.” He said Assemblies churches are encouraged to meet local needs, and many have provided day care “with a great deal of success.”

In contrast, the Church of the Nazarene has taken a position on day care. According to Mark York, coordinator for Nazarene Christian schools, the church does not view day care as detrimental to children nor would it refuse to offer infant day care. York said Nazarene congregations see themselves as the “extended family of God,” able to minister to both the day-care child and the child’s family.

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Affecting The Tie That Binds

What is at issue is the quality of the infant-mother bond. British psychoanalyst John Bowlby has written that “a young child’s hunger for his mother’s presence is as great as his hunger for food.” This hunger helps produce attachment, or the enduring bond that forms between a child and mother during the first 12 months of life.

Bowlby believes this bond forms the core of a child’s personality. The process of developing an attachment to the mother may be disrupted or impaired if the mother is physically or psychologically inaccessible to her child. If this happens, Bowlby believes the child could grow up to be anxious, insecure, compulsively self-reliant, or depressed. While arguments rage among child development theorists about the impact day care has on this bond, numerous studies indicate that the quality of attachment is indeed affected.

Some studies show that day-care children, particularly if they have been in some form of out-of-home care since infancy, are more likely to avoid contact with their mothers after a brief, stressful separation than children reared at home. Certain researchers, including Jay Belsky and Edward Zigler, argue that this may be evidence of insecure attachment. Others, such as Greta Fein and Alison Clarke-Stewart, suggest this is merely a coping style the day-care child has adopted.

Early personality development is viewed as significant because studies show that children who were insecure or who avoided their mothers at 12 and 18 months become hostile, withdrawn, uncooperative kindergarteners. Children found to be securely attached early on became the social leaders of their kindergarten classes: forceful, self-directed, and better able to cope with life.

Other Considerations

Bryna Siegel, a psychologist at Stanford University, who has observed children in day-care centers, day-care homes, and at home with their mothers for more than 1,000 hours, believes the “texture” of the day-care child’s life is different from that of the child reared at home with his mother. “A child at home is always hanging around his mother,” she notes. “He and his mother go many places together—the grocery store, a friend’s home, the park, the library.” In day care, on the other hand, there is more confinement and the risk of an “attenuated experience.” The child has “fewer building blocks with which to put his world together,” Siegel suggests. She is opposed to day care before a child reaches two-and-a-half years of age.

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The absence of scientific studies on long-term effects of day care is a concern among researchers. Jerome Kagan, professor at Harvard University, has said of day care’s children, “I think they will be different, but I can’t say how.” T. Berry Brazelton, this generation’s Dr. Spock, has said (Fortune, Nov. 28, 1983) that the effects on character are largely uncharted. Siegel suggests that day care is “altering the cultural fabric.” She speculates that children who grow up lacking a close bond with their mothers will have fewer marriages, fewer nuclear families, and more divorces.

Options For The Church

If long-term effects of day care are unknown, what is the church to do? Many leaders believe day care is here to stay and that the church cannot stop offering such support. But most also agree that it is time for the church to seriously review—in light of psychological findings and scriptural teachings—what it can do to help struggling families.

Ted Ward believes a commitment to day care needs to be fashioned in the context of clearer biblical teaching about values. Meeting needs pragmatically comes second, he said, and influencing national policy to promote family stability is a third priority for the church.

“Christian response begins not when our own is hurt but when the other is hurt,” he said. Day care, he believes, indicates church responsiveness beyond the confines of the white, middle-class, “traditional family.” That attitude, he said, needs additional nurturing.

Also in need of nurturing, according to Ward, is the church’s attitude toward materialism. He believes day care is a response to a more pervasive problem whose root cause is affluence. Says Ward, “Some of the dual-spouse work is unnecessary, but as long as ours is a goods-oriented society, the notion of access to that materialism is part of the national psyche.”

Psychologist Siegel has studied the influence of lifestyle choices on parenting by taking a look at professional women in their mid-30s in California. Many of these married women lived in areas where monthly house payments ranged from $2,500 to $3,500. Many had a live-in nanny, and drove a Mercedes or a Volvo.

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“They had simply developed lifestyles that couldn’t be supported by one income,” said Siegel, “and their expensive lifestyles may have predetermined their attitudes toward their babies.” Siegel found that women who go back to work soon after giving birth (by 12 weeks) believe their babies need a lot of material goods to survive the early weeks of life. “This is a far cry from the way women in my mother’s generation viewed their babies. Sometimes their babies slept in a laundry basket or drawer during the early weeks of life.”

As the church challenges its members’ definition of “need,” it can also support the value of mothering. The popular press, with blatant disregard of much developmental literature, suggests that anyone can perform the role of “mother.” This message undercuts a woman’s belief that she is central to her child’s life and emotional development. Feeling alone and unsupported, sometimes by their own churches, many women claim that choosing to devote themselves to child-rearing, even for the first few years, is just too costly in terms of psychological pain. The church needs to counter this cultural message by actively supporting the value of mothering and by providing emotional support for mothers at home.

The church can also provide some measure of financial assistance for struggling two-parent families or single parents who wish to devote more time to child care. Within the community of believers, individual Christians can sensitively respond to instances of genuine need. Such responses will not, of course, begin to cover the needs of all Christian families relying on day care, single parents, or families outside the church’s sphere of influence. But the value of viable Christian community should not be minimized. Not only can it serve those in its midst, but it also can model a totally different approach to human relationships and nurturing than society proposes.

Unfortunately, our very young children cannot effectively articulate their needs. We can be sure, however, that babies’ needs remain the same no matter how our techniques of child-rearing change. Lay Christians and church leaders who feel compelled to meet the growing need for child care have an obligation to assess how day care affects child development—physical, emotional, and spiritual. In this way, the church will help fulfill an important part of its calling and become an advocate for our children.

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