[rayiner]

Caring is a separate issue from having the aptitude and temperament for the labor of child care. I'd do anything for my daughter, but let's face it, she's boring. She's slightly smarter than a puppy, and while it's all magical a couple of hours a day, I can't imagine engaging with her day-in and day-out, any more than I can imagine being a factory worker who just does one movement all day long. I'd go crazy.

The daycare worker certainly wouldn't run in front of a bus to protect my kid, which I'd do in a heartbeat. But that's not a day-to-day need.

[mr_luc]

Have you taken a look at the study this article is written about?

I'd agree that it makes intuitive sense that childcare could do better than exhausted working parents, and possibly even emotionally drained stay-at-home parents, but another poster pointed out that this study seems to say "people who can afford daily childcare have children with better outcomes" -- which might correlate pretty closely with "wealthier people's kids have better outcomes", which the research already told us.

As an aside, these kinds of discussions (where HN talks about the world's social problems) are the second reason I come to HN. I'll get exposed to great worldviews, from generally smart people, expressed by people who speak my language.

And child care, together with the possibly related problem of currently worse outcomes for children of single-parent families, are social problems that are potentially immensely valuable for society to solve.

[meric]

While I agree with you I'm not sure that is a good use of "certainly"...It depends how many kids the worker is with and which one is her favourite, as well as the character of the daycare worker. There were plenty of strange* men volunteering to die in frozen waters to save women and children when the titanic went down, for example.

* in the stranger sense of the word.

[__z]

Also Wesley Autrey, the "Subway Hero" who dove onto the tracks of the oncoming 1 train in order to save a stranger who had a seizure and fell onto the tracks. He held the man down in a drainage trench and the subway cars passed over them. That's about as literal as "jumping in front of a bus" as it gets.

Plus all the teachers at Sandy Hook who gave their lives protecting their students.

Those two are just off the top of my head. The willingness to put one's self in danger for others isn't exclusive to parents.