A leading child-care expert has disputed the findings of a new study which claims that children are not harmed when they are placed in crèches as small babies.

The study, entitled “First-Year Maternal Employment and Child Development in the First 7 Years”, purported to show that, because women who returned to work early tended to have higher incomes, have better home environments and can afford better quality childcare, this compensated for putting their babies into day-care centres.

It looked at a sample of 1,000 seven-year-olds, and was reported as “ground-breaking” because it differed from the majority of other studies in the field, which showed that children tended to have worse outcomes if their mothers worked in the first year of their babies’ lives.

The authors of the study, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Wen-Jui Han and Professor Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University, claimed that they had discovered “that while early maternal employment has some downsides, it also offers some advantages – increasing mothers’ income, and making it more likely that children attend high-quality child care”.

“Taking the advantages and disadvantages into account, the net effect is neutral,” they said.

However, one of the leading experts on the effects of childcare on children, Professor Jay Belsky, has criticised the study.

He says that the researchers include in the same study mothers who went back to work when their babies were still only few weeks old and mothers who went back to work when their children were almost a year old. The babies placed in care at almost a year old improve the overall results of the study giving the impression that very early day-care does no harm to children.

Belsky says: “Most of the adverse outcomes shown up in the study relate to children who went into day care early in the first year. So it doesn’t make sense to conclude that day care in the first year is good, or even neutral, for the child.”

Belsky has studied the impact that the amount of time infants spend in childcare has on their development through to their teenage years and adulthood. To date, studies with which he has been involved show that an increase in levels of aggression and disobedience is correlated with a greater amount of time spent in childcare at an early age.

A recent poll commissioned by the Centre for Policy Studies in the UK shows that an overwhelming number of women believe that it is better for a mother with two children under five to either work part time or full-time in the home if there is a working father, and it is not essential financially for her to work full-time.

Fifty per cent of women believed it was better for a mother in that situation to work part time, with 41 per cent believing she should be at home fulltime. Only two per cent of women believed that it was better for her to work full-time.