A new study by researchers at the University of Illinois indicates that children who spend in excess of 30 hours per week in non-relative care through the age of 4 1/2 may be exposed to a social environment that popularizes aggression. Philip Rodkin, a professor of educational psychology, was one of the lead researchers.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. A new study by researchers at the University of Illinois indicates that children who spend in excess of 30 hours per week in non-relative care through the age of 4 1/2 may be exposed to a social environment that popularizes aggression, leading some children to become more physically aggressive than peers who spend less time in nonmaternal care. Philip Rodkin, a professor of educational psychology , and psychology professor Glenn Roisman studied more than 1,000 children in grades 3-6 across the U.S. to identify characteristics common among a small but influential group of children who are simultaneously aggressive and popular with their peers. Their study was published recently in the journal Child Development. "Aggression can be popular if you're in an aggressive situation - and unpopular if you're not," Rodkin said. Rodkin and Roisman wondered whether tough kids were smarter than other kids, enabling them to rise to the top socially? Did they have more attentive or affluent parents, perhaps? "One of the reasons that we wanted to do this study was that we wanted to understand the kinds of conditions under which these characteristics co-occur," Roisman said. "Our quest to understand these individuals wound up leading us back to child care as the explanation." Roisman is a co-principal investigator on the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, an ongoing study that has tracked more than 1,000 children since they were infants.
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