3 New Studies Assess Effects of Child Care - New York Times

Here is an interesting article about a study done on daycare. Part of the conclusion of the article is that kids that go to daycare centers do better in math and reading, than kids that don’t go to daycare, and tend to retain that knowledge in later years. But they found out that they tended to do worse with social skills but that tended to fade somewhat over time.

The overall feel you get from the article is that the amount of damage done socially is overcome as time goes by. But when you look at it they are comparing it to the norm, which are publicly schooled kids. My guess is that if you compared them to home-schooled kids there social skills would continue to show a relative decline. So it may be that the daycare kids are not getting better but in fact all the non-daycare kids might be getting worse by going to school.