Thursday, January 10, 2008
The following article makes the case that child care is indeed harmful to children. I disagree but feel there are some vaild points that are made which mare directly point to problems with child care of insufficient quality...
Until recently, parents typically had a far more negative view of day care than experts did. Not long ago, I stumbled across the following datum in a 1992 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association that may help explain why: In the course of one year of full-time day care, a middle-class white male toddler was “likely to be bitten” nine
times.
A social scientist might point out that there is no firm evidence that being mauled by one’s peers has any negative effect on one’s psychosocial development. But I have never run across the parent who, faced with this bit of news, does not shudder. That is the difference between a social scientist and a parent.But over the last decade, the gap between expert and folk wisdom appears to be closing. A growing number of child-development experts have joined the ranks of parents who worry that extensive day care is not good for young children.An emerging body of research suggests that children in full-time day care are less likely to be firmly attached to their parents and are on average more disobedient toward adults and more aggressive toward their peers than children cared for primarily by their parents. In certain circumstances, day care also puts children’s cognitive development at risk.
Of course, not all children in day care are damaged by the experience. But the new data should give parents — and policymakers — pause, especially as the Clinton Administration is ready to unveil a major new child-care initiative. For in this case, the Administration is promoting as “child-friendly” policy something actively harmful to some children.
A review of the day-care literature was published in 1996 by Michael E. Lamb of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHHD). While noting that non-parental care “need not” have harmful effects, Lamb concluded that it often does, depending “on the quality of care and the child’s age, temperament, and individual background.”
Under ideal circumstances — when the child develops a strong, stable attachment to an alternative caregiver —day care may not be harmful. But, he concludes, “in other circumstances, [non-parental care] leads to behavior problems (including aggression & noncompliance).”The trouble is that most day-care kids are, indeed, in “other circumstances.”
Quality child care, as experts now understand it, does not refer to variables such as group size or caregiver training that can be regulated by government (day-care boosters tend to be obsessed with licensing and training).
Instead, quality care is dependent on the same underlying emotional processes that make for strong mother - child relationships. For young children, high-quality care means a caregiver who stays with the child for long periods — “years, not months,” says one expert. A high-quality caregiver babbles, chatters, coos, hugs, strokes a baby or toddler, and consistently makes the effort to respond warmly to his verbal and non-verbal attempts at communication.
Few employees can meet such demanding standards. A 1995 national study by the University of Colorado found that only 8 per cent of day-care centers serving infants and toddlers offer high-quality care; in 40 per cent of centers, the care is so bad that it endangers young children’s psychological and cognitive development. Indeed, for cognitive development, the research suggests that the children of educated mothers may be at special risk — because of the contrast between the care they get at home and at the typical day-care center.
As I stated at the beginning... I have some reservations with this opinion... particularly with the impression that the majority of the children are NOT in quality child care. I agre that there are poor quality child care facilities in business, but I think we need to be realistic in our evaluation that there is just as good a chance that the children are being raised by "poor quality" parents. Too often of late, all of society's woes are pinned to children growing up outside the home in a child care setting. In reality, there are many more negative influences, including the media, that can and should share the blame.
My goal in posting this is two-fold... parents need to beware of care that is not high quality and providers need to strive to fit that defination.
Read the entire article and send me your opinion.
