Many parents tend to think of day-care centers as breeding grounds for colds.
But new resarch suggests that children in day-care centers appear to develop immunity to many of the viruses responsible for the common cold.
An article published in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine found that children ages 6 to 11 who had beenenrolled at large day-care centers as toddlers had about one-third as many colds as children who had stayed home as toddlers.
Dr. Thomas Ball,one of the authors of the study,says that when children have colds as toddlers,their immune systems are learning from these experiences,and this learning will come back to protect children later in life.
Such news should be reassuring to parents whose preschool children are in daycare.