> Daycare isn't unbeneficial to a child.

That's a very simplified observation of a complex reality. Not all daycares are created equal: The National Institute of Child Health Development[1] found that most daycare operations are "fair" or "poor". Only 10% are "high-quality". Obviously the details are what matter in each case: a caring parent at home is far better than a crowded day-care. Conversely, a great daycare can help with a bad home situation.

[1] https://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/documents/seccyd...

It's a fair point, I was trying to come up with a concise way to refute "but it would also be hugely beneficial for the children's development!" because I'm not sure that's entirely true. There's nothing I've seen saying that, everything else staying the same, a parent at home is massively more beneficial than a child in daycare. The most important thing is parental involvement, and that can be done with or without daycare. A stay-at-home parent who doesn't engage their child is just as bad as two working parents who do the same.

I have friends and family who work in primary education and they all say it's immediately obvious which children have two working parents. The kids without a full time homemaker have far more developmental problems.

What? As a father of (soon to be) three children this sounds really odd to me. My kids have always loved going to daycare and I've never heard of it causing any developmental problems. On the contrary my own experience is that daycare really accelerates kids development.

Most children in Sweden have two working parents and start daycare when they are around a year old. Daycare in Sweden is considered part of the school system and the teachers working there have (approximately) the same education as 'regular' school teachers.

Edit: Also, as a related fact in this discussion, in Sweden children that are behind in learning to speak (language development) can actually receive special permission to spend _more_ time in daycare to help speed up their language learning.

Children with working parents is one group. Children with developmental problems is another group. There is surely some overlap, but that is far from saying that children with working parents will always have developmental problems. I can point to some people I know and say "they're an only child" based on the way they behave, but that's ignoring the millions of 'only child's who have no behavioral problems or the millions of people from multi-child households who still have difficulty functioning in normal society.

There is certainly more to a child's behavior than whether their parents were working or staying at home. There might be a strong correlation to households with two working parents and households with other developmentally-stunting factors like parental illiteracy or low education levels, low levels of parental involvement, etc, but I'm sure you would have a tough time proving to any level that, with all other factors remaining the same, two working parents cause more damage to a child than having a stay-at-home parent.

For what it's worth (as long as your anecdotal experience means something to you), my brother-in-law is a college administrator and my sister is a first grade teacher and they have two children who don't seem to have any developmental issues. But my sister has kids in her class with a stay-at-home parent who certainly do.

From what I've read, research suggests that children from higher quality daycares had higher vocabulary scores, but worse social/behavioral problems (academic habits, more impulsiveness, risk-taking).

One relevant source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17381797

Any credible cites for this?