Child Care and Child Development: Results from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Edited by The NICHD Early Child Care Research Network. New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 2005. Hardcover, 474 pages, $25.00 As the number of mothers in the United States entering the workforce grew rapidly between the 1970s and 1990s, questions about the effects of child care on young children's development and mother-child relationships were raised by parents and policymakers. This was the impetus for the National Institute on Child and Human Development (NICHD) to embark on a 10-site, longitudinal study tracking the development of 1,364 children starting in infancy to examine the effects of child care. Data from this comprehensive study were presented in over 116 scientific articles to date, and this book contains abridged versions of the most important papers. The study advanced understanding of the effects of child care by improving on the experimental designs used in previous studies and including follow-up measures.
