What are the consequences of non-parental daycare for children's emotional development, the relationship with their caregivers, and the relationship with their own parents? In optimally stable and continuous daycare settings, infants appear to be emotionally attached to their parents as well as to the professional caregiver.
We have proposed the concept of attachment networks and we developed some criteria for attachment relationships between children and their professional caregivers. Our hypothesis is that secure child-caregiver attachments may compensate for insecure child-parent bonds.

Recently, the number of children in Dutch daycare has increased rapidly, and we are currently studying the impact of this explosive growth on the quality of care, and on children's development, with special emphasis on their well-being.
With the Dutch Consortium for Research in Child Care (Nederlands Consortium Kinderopvang Onderzoek; NCKO) investigations were carried out into whether daycare facilities in the Netherlands still are of sufficient quality and to what extent these facilities promote the development of extended and secure attachment networks. Reliable knowledge about the quality of adult-child interactions in Dutch daycare is lacking and neither is it clear how children integrate multiple attachment relationships.