A new study suggests child care can be more harmful for children from high socio-economic backgrounds who miss out on quality time at home with their parents.
But it appears to benefit children from low socio-economic backgrounds, especially when staff ratios are high and groups of children are small.
The study by Australian National University economist Professor Andrew Leigh and social policy researcher Chikako Yamauchi backs up previous Australian and international research showing the effects of non-parental child care differ according to the quality of the care and the social background of the child.
Using data from the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Children, which follows 10,000 children born in 2004, the study finds some evidence of worse behaviour displayed by children who are not cared for by their own parents when they are aged between two and three.
Yet the study cautions that it would be a mistake to conclude that child care is generally harmful for children.
The correlation between child care and poorer behaviour appears to be linked to a child's background, with children from wealthy, educated parents more likely to behave poorly in child care compared with those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
''This accords with prior research, and may reflect the fact that children in these families have more resources at home, or that there are differences in parenting across socio-economic groups,'' Professor Leigh said.
High socio-economic households contained parents who were more likely to spend more time with their children, more likely to read books, less likely to watch television, less likely to use corporal punishment, and used larger vocabularies to speak with their children.
Conversely, children from disadvantaged backgrounds were more likely to spend time in front of the television, were less likely to be engaged in conversation with their parents, and less likely to benefit from educational activities and exposure to books. In these cases, child care probably filled important gaps in their development.
The research also found evidence that the negative association between behavioural outcomes and child care use was reduced in child-care centres with smaller group sizes.
In this case, children were exposed to higher levels of adult supervision and interaction.
Professor Leigh will present his research in a keynote address at the Growing Up in Australia: Longitudinal Study of Australian Children conference in Melbourne today.
He cautioned that the research showed only minimal differences in the effect of child care on children and said there was no need for parents to feel guilty about sending their children to day care each day.
''For what it is worth, I won't be pulling my two-year-old out of child care,'' he said. He believed the huge expansion in formal day care had been beneficial for women and for national productivity.
''It ought to be true that happy parents including parents who want to work are good parents.''
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