Debating Early Child Care: The Relationship between Developmental Science and the Media

Robert Crosnoe · Tama Leventhal

mar 2016 · Cambridge University Press

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Throughout distressing cultural battles and disputes over child care, each side claims to have the best interests of children at heart. While developmental scientists have concrete evidence for this debate, their message is often lost or muddied by the media. To demonstrate why this problem matters, this book examines the extensive media coverage of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development – a long-running government-funded study that provides the most comprehensive look at the effects of early child care on American children. Analyses of newspaper articles and interviews with scientists and journalists reveal what happens to science in the public sphere and how children's issues can be used to question parents' choices. By shining light on these issues, the authors bring clarity to the enduring child care wars while providing recommendations for how scientists and the media can talk to – rather than past – each other.

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Robert Crosnoe is the C. B. Smith, Sr Centennial Chair at the University of Texas, Austin. His research focuses on the education and healthy development of children from diverse backgrounds, and his books include Fitting In, Standing Out: Navigating the Social Challenges of High School to Get an Education (Cambridge, 2011) and Healthy Learners: A Whole Child Approach to Reducing Disparities in Early Education (2015). Dr Crosnoe has won research awards from the Society for Research in Child Development and the American Sociological Association.

Tama Leventhal is an Associate Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts University, Massachusetts. Her research is at the intersection of child development and social policy, with a focus on neighborhood and housing contexts. Her work appears in journals on developmental psychology, family studies, sociology, psychiatry and public health. She is co-editor of the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science: Ecological Settings and Processes in Developmental Systems, Volume 4 (2015).