Child care and children's illness

This paper uses nationally representative data from the Child Health Supplement of the 1981 National Health Interview Survey to test the hypothesis that the larger the groups in which children receive care, the more days per year they spend in bed due to illness. We estimate a model of annual bed days for children ages six months to two and one-half years old, and separately for children two and one-half to five years old. Our results show significantly higher numbers of bed days for children in day care centers than for children at home for both age groups, controlling for confounding factors. Children in family day care have significantly more bed days than those at home, but only among the younger sample. The negative effect of family day care is less than that of child care centers. Although the relative effect of group care is to increase annual bed days by 30 to 19 per cent, the absolute effect is modest with children in group care having 1.3 to .6 more bed days per year.