This recent article on daycare by Phoebe Arslanagic-Little and Ellen Pasternack in Works in Progress has a pretty anticlimactic subtitle: If it had a clear effect on children we would know by now.
The piece is intended as an antidote to both the cultural backlash against daycare and the early 21st century Pollyannaism about its transformative effects.
Instead, daycare is fine. It’s better than fine, actually, it’s useful. Clearly it works for a lot of families. But it will not change the trajectory of an typical child’s life, for good or for ill.
Having completed a PhD in the health sciences and started my scientific career during the replication crisis and subsequent metascience revolution, none of this really surprises me anymore. Truly effective interventions are hard to find, much harder than we wish they were, and benefits are often incremental rather than transformational. Headlines are too often more flash than substance. See Freddie deBoer for an even more dour take on educational reform.
Sometimes a useful thing is just useful.