When Your Multilingual Child Starts Daycare: The importance of attachment

Children have an innate need to develop “secure” attachment with their parents. Secure attachment is established when you, as the parent, consistently meet your child's physical and emotional needs. If your child is hungry, you feed your child. If your child is distressed, you comfort your child. Through this consistent interplay, your child learns that you are a reliable caregiver, and a deep trust develops in the child. Your child knows that you are a safe and secure base, and so they start exploring their world — knowing they can always count on you to be there for them when they need help or comfort.

Secure attachment is well researched, and studies show that children with secure attachment in early childhood develop better in many areas, including cognitive development, emotional development, and language development (e.g., Deneault et al., 2023; van IJzendoorn et al., 1995). The thing about secure attachment is that it takes time and consistency to develop. For primary caregivers, this is often not a problem because three important factors are met: (1) the child only has to attach to one or two parents, (2) parents naturally spend lots of time with their children, and (3) parents are usually naturally responsive to their child's needs.

However, when children start going to childcare, they need to start over. Your child now has to develop secure attachment with an entirely new adult — or perhaps several new adults.

Developing secure attachment to secondary caregivers

Psychologists refer to the new adults that your child has to develop secure attachment to as “secondary caregivers.” The process for developing attachment appears to be the same in this context: when the new caregivers provide consistent physical and emotional care, your child relaxes in the situation and becomes secure. The research shows, however, that children can spend many months developing this attachment. One group in particular seems to experience more difficulty: children with a different language and cultural background from the staff.

In an American study by Howes and Shivers (2006), researchers followed more than 200 children entering daycare and preschool over a six-month period. They found that children who did not share the adults' language and cultural background had a tendency to remain insecure: these children were less likely to seek help or comfort from an adult when they were having difficulties.

Language barrier and cultural differences

When children start in childcare with minimal or no understanding of the language being used there (Danish, in this case), they lose one of the key tools that other children have for adapting to the new context: language comprehension. A typical Danish child can't say many words when starting up in vuggestue, but they actually understand quite a lot. And this helps them in the distressing situation of being separated from their parents and looked after by secondary caregivers. Children with a non-Danish background do not have this advantage, which can make the process even more distressing for them.

Cultural differences can compound the child's distress as well. Different food, different ways of being together, and so on give the child even more changes to navigate.

As a reaction to this distress, your child may behave very quietly during the day at childcare (after crying a lot at drop-off). The quietness has long been suggested to be an effect of the language learning process. The idea being that the child becomes quiet because they are listening (Krashen, 1982). But the research doesn't actually support this (Kan et al., 2025; Roberts, 2014). Quietness can just as easily be a sign that the child feels insecure. The first two weeks in childcare are tough for all children, but it's a good sign if your child starts communicating with the adults through pointing, making sounds, or speaking in their own language during this period. It is a bad sign if your child is still very passive and non-communicative in childcare after a few weeks.

Shy children tend to be more insecure during the start-up process in childcare (Harris, 2019), but it's important that shyness not be used to explain why some children are not attaching. Attachment is shaped first and foremost by how the adults respond.

The challenge of institutional childcare

It is a little politically incorrect to criticize the early institutionalization of children in Denmark, but in all fairness, I think it's important that parents be aware of a basic barrier to attachment: the number of adults the child has to attach itself to. From an attachment theory perspective, children should ideally have only one secondary caregiver in the beginning of childcare, and as the child's attachment grows, new adults can be added to the mix. This is, however, rarely how Danish vuggestue and børnehave work in practice.

The reality is that your child will probably meet several new caregivers in the child care centre. This poses a potentially significant problem for the child: who will be there for them when they arrive in the morning? Will that person be available during the day? What about in the afternoon? It's not ideal in terms of attachment theory. That said, children are resilient, and they can – and often do – develop secure attachment over time in the childcare institution. So what makes the difference?

Tips to help your child develop secure attachment

• Before starting in the institution, visit the centre together with your child and meet the adults who will be looking after them. Be very enthusiastic (even if you're not feeling that way inside) so that your child senses that you are positive towards the new adults.

• Agree with the staff that one employee will be your child's “main adult” for the first weeks of childcare. Coordinate with this person so that you can drop off and pick up your child during their work hours.

• Participate in your child's start-up, and keep your child's attendance short for the first days. As your child becomes more familiar with the setting, you can start leaving for increasingly longer periods.

• Come consistently, too. Taking a few days off to be at home with your child can have a resetting effect, undoing some of the progress.

• Offer to teach the staff a few important words or phrases in your child's language, and write down a list of keywords they can use with your child. This helps alleviate the language barrier.

There are many potential benefits of institutional childcare

This blog-article is not intended to make your nervous about childcare for your multilingual child. There are so many potential benefits of going to Danish vuggestue and børnehave, which come about once the child has settled in. From language to socialization to becoming a part of a community of other children, your child gets a lot out of their attendance. The challenge is the settling in part, and I hope this article can help here.

References

Deneault, A.-A., Duschinsky, R., van IJzendoorn, M. H., Roisman, G. I., Ly, A., Fearon, R. M. P., & Madigan, S. (2023). Does child–mother attachment predict and mediate language and cognitive outcomes? A series of meta-analyses. Developmental Review, 70, 101093.

Harris, R. (2019). Re-assessing the place of the “silent period” in the development of English as an Additional Language among children in Early Years settings. TEANGA, the Journal of the Irish Association for Applied Linguistics, 10, 77–93.

Howes, C., & Shivers, E. M. (2006). New child–caregiver attachment relationships: Entering childcare when the caregiver is and is not an ethnic match. Social Development, 15(4), 574–590.

Kan, P. F., Jones, M., Meyers-Denman, C., & Sparks, N. (2025). Emergent bilingual children during the silent period: A scoping review of their communication strategies and classroom environments. Journal of Child Language, 52(3), 558–591.

Krashen, S. D. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Pergamon Press.

Roberts, T. A. (2014). Not so silent after all: Examination and analysis of the silent stage in childhood second language acquisition. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 29(1), 22–40.

van IJzendoorn, M. H., Dijkstra, J., & Bus, A. G. (1995). Attachment, intelligence, and language: A meta-analysis. Social Development, 4(2), 115–128.