Press Release: First Comprehensive National Study Finds Centers
Safest Form of Childcare Child care centers are much safer than
all other forms of child care, according to a new national
study. Sociologists Julia Wrigley and Joanna Dreby of the City
University of New York Graduate Center created a comprehensive
database of child care failures, including fatalities, between
1985 and 2003. They found that child care is quite safe overall,
and child care fatalities are rarer than outside of paid care.
But the fatality rate for children who receive child care in
private homes is sixteen times higher than the fatality rate for
children in child care centers. The study appears in the October
issue of the American Sociological Review . It was funded by the
Foundation for Child Development. While more than 8 million
children are in paid child care every day, until now little has
been known about their safety. Wrigley and Dreby analyzed
reports of 1,362 fatalities (among 4,356 caregiving failures)
from 1985 to 2003. T