Considering Day Care or Child Care?
Some information you might want to consider
before
making that decision.
1. Click here
to see what infant mental
health professionals PRIVATELY think is the best care for under
3's.
2. Click here
to see some results
of the largest study of day care in the United States (as published
in the Wall Street Journal July 16, 2003)
3.
Click here
to see: "It is
fairly clear from data from different parts of the world that
the less time children spend in group care before three years,
the better." (as published in The Guardian Thursday July
8, 2004)
4. Click here
to see what is probably
the most thorough review of day care problems on the internet.
5. Click here
for a website which
contains an extensive index of publications about child care from
well-known child development authorities, psychologists, psychiatrists,
paediatricians, public policy analysts, sociologists, day care
providers and others.
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A few thoughts, by Penelope Leach:
"...Babies
do not only need constant care, they also need consistent care.
Consistent care does not necessarily, or even optimally, mean
from one single person all the time.
Only in Western industrialized societies is a baby ever assumed
to be the responsibility of his mother alone; everywhere else
he gets primary care from his mother and subsidiary care from
a whole range of other people including older siblings, grandparents
and neighbours.
But however many people care for a baby, they do need to be the
same people all the time.
Many babies start life with the special people who are usually
their parents but then, when emotional attachment, feelings of
effectiveness and communication have begun to develop, find themselves
with strangers.
Depending on his age and maturity and his previous experiences,
such a baby will have developed a wide range of more or less subtle
cues and he will be beginning to have expectations about people's
responses to them. Having those cues missed or misinterpreted,
or receiving responses which are new to him or out of line with
anything he knows, will shake his confidence. But he is still
a survivor. If the strangers are part- or full-time substitute
parents who, once on the scene, remain constantly part of his
life, he will gradually adapt. If his mother is around to help
him make the transition, to 'translate him' for the newcomers
and to blend their 'style' with her own, he will adapt more quickly.
The new people will be made 'special'. He will teach them to understand
him and to respond to him just as he taught his mother. But if
the newcomers to his life have no time to 'listen' to him, concentrate
on him, feel their way with him, perhaps because he is now part
of a group or perhaps because they are part of a stream of short-term
caretakers, his development may truly suffer...
A baby who does not have anybody special, but is cared for by
many well-meaning strangers in turn, or one who is cared for sketchily
and without concentration, sharing his caretaker with other needful
small people, is like an adult who moves from country to country,
knowing the language of none.
Baby and adult must each rely on the universal language of gross
gesture and tolerate high levels of isolation and low levels of
understanding. Neither can develop any subtlety of communication
nor certainty as to whether or why things have been understood
or have taken place. The adult returns home with relief. The baby
had better stay there...
I do not think that it is possible to over-emphasize these twin
factors of individuality and continuity in a baby's care..."
Penelope Leach's Your Baby & Child is the most loved, trusted and comprehensive book in its field--with almost two million copies sold in America alone. Newsweek says that it is not only one of the best parenting books, but also "by far the most pleasurable to read."