Daycare Info

1: The inherent problem with institutional group care for under 3's:

group care means constant changes of staff.

In group settings employers fight to keep staff by improving conditions, but every concession to adult needs reduces fulfillment of childrens'.

Split-shifts to cover the long nursery day reduce adult hours by doubling the number of people with whom babies must interact.
Lunch breaks, sick leave, vacations and in-service training courses, produce such constant staff movement that case studies suggest an average of seven different people a day and fifteen a week (some of them strangers "filling in") handling each child.

A baby that’s in that kind of care is in a situation where he’s being cared for by somebody who even if she was there yesterday, because it wasn’t her day off, doesn’t know what happened to that child in the twelve hours that he’s been at home. Now when a child is growing and changing and developing and working very hard at particular areas of his development, even twelve hours can put you totally out of step. Caring for a baby non-continuously is a continual process of experiment. And it may not hurt the baby for one afternoon, but it’s awful bad for babies if all of their infant lives they are having to communicate with people to whom their language is foreign.

Penelope Leach

2: Why Under 3’s need the same people all the time:

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... (Penelope Leach)

3: Why Under 3’s need a whole caretaker all to themselves:

Individual carers are better placed to meet babies needs.
They have only one child of any particular age and stage to cope with and this is vital. When you cope with two or three at once, there is no way you can simultaneously respond to messages about milk, cuddles, and dropped toys. (ask anyone who has triplets.)
That is not something our present society readily acknowledges, though. After all, one-to-one care by someone outside the family offers no economies of scale. If it releases anyone to fill the skill-shortage it does so only by leaving babies with less-skilled - or at least less well paid adults, an uncomfortably colonialist thought.
So acknowledgment of babies needs for individual care would mean admitting that where a parent wanted to be at home with a child, s/he was the obvious caregiver and should be economically supported in that choice. (Penelope Leach)

Penelope Leach gained her doctorate in Social Psychology for a study of the effects of different sorts of upbringing on children’s developing moral judgments and social sense. She worked on juvenile delinquency for the Home Office and became a Research Fellow under the Medical Research Council, conducting a large scale study of the effects of babies on their parents. Her book Babyhood established her reputation as an authority on infant development. Her world bestseller Baby and Child put child development into the context of the realities of childcare. Its continuing sales in twenty-nine languages approach two million. Her book The Parents’ A to Z is being used by the World Health Organization as the basis for its planned World Encyclopedia of Childcare.
 

6: Adults who have the capacity to care for others are made not born.

The capacities basic to caring are empathy and trust – capacities established or not in the first three years through secure attachment to (optimally) the mother.

Further, the capacity to form long-term meaningful mutually satisfying relationships is the basis for stable familial relationships for the rearing of the next generation. First Three Years — Next Three Generations

Daycare for under 3’s puts the development of these capacities at risk.

Attachment expresses a psychobiological attunement between a mother (or primary caregiver) and child. Over the first 18 months of life mother-child interactions indelibly influence the evolution of brain structures responsible for social and emotional functioning for the rest of the life span. Brain development in general, and the maturation of the prefrontal cortex in particular, take place after birth through this emotional exchange. It appears that the mother is actually the external regulator of her child's biochemistry. Verbal exchange, but especially nonverbal emotional communication via affect (or feeling) is intimately linked with internal neurochemical and neurobiological development. (Shore, 1994, p.7).

A mother is actually the hidden regulator of her infant's endocrine and nervous systems. ... the mother induces changes in emotional state in her infant, and in doing so directly influences the infant's learning of how, how much, and whether to feel. ... The link between the internal physiological world of the infant and the internal physiological world of the mother, ... paves the way for all later relationships ... In addition, maternal behaviour is thought to be significant in mediating genetic influences, many of which are dependent on transactions within the child's environment. (Bloom, 1997)

Excerpted from: Etiology of Aggressive Antisocial Behaviour: Four Key Developmental Factors by Carole Hood Ph.D. in Youth Update, Spring 2003
 

10: Consumerism

It is consumerism that drives the 80 hour work week.  Consumerism: The World's Fastest Growing Religion

The desire for daycare for under 3’s is a by-product of consumerism. Mothers and fathers are programmed to believe they need the money a mother can earn during the three years her child needs her most.
This in one of the richest countries of the world.
We should not supporting a level of consumption that poses risks to new human beings.

How can it be that in the United States, the richest society this planet has ever known, families cannot afford the division of labor of home and working life that is simply taken for granted in even the poorest societies?
Going back to the early 1970s ... official figures from the Household Expenditure Survey in Britain show ... average weekly household expenditure on the essentials — housing, fuel, food and clothing — was roughly the same as today (at constant prices ... $ 92.50 then compared to $ 100 now). Housing costs have risen, but the price of food and clothing has fallen.
What has changed is the extent of our spending on luxury goods, childcare, leisure and vacations abroad — expenditures on these categories have more than doubled during that period (from $34.38 to $73.13). And automobile expenses too have nearly doubled during the same period...
James Tooley The Miseducation of Women

Proportion of Average Family Income Spent on Food, Shelter and Clothing
LICO Level is for a family of four in 1993 dollars, urban centres of 500,000 plus
1959
Proportion - 50 percent
LICO Level - $19,123
1969
Proportion - 42 percent
LICO Level - $24,870
1978
Proportion - 38.5 percent
LICO Level - $28,243
1986
Proportion - 36.2 percent
LICO Level - $30,645

1992
Proportion - 34.7 percent
LICO Level - $31,007
Source: Statistics Canada, Income distributions by size in Canada, (Cat. 13-207 various issues)
 

11: Extensive non-parental care in infancy is without long-term precedent in humans or any other mammals.

The major environmental changes involved in this massive social experiment should have some kind of “environmental impact assessment”. The burden of proof that such changes in the early environment of infants are safe should be on those who advocate them, just as the purveyors of other environmental changes, like additives to food or water, must provide evidence that. they are safe for human consumption. As in medicine, the precautionary principle of primum non nocere – “first and foremost do no harm” – should apply. This principle is not being applied in polices which advocate more child care for infants and young children.
Dr. Peter Cook M.B.,Ch.B (NZ), F.R.A.N.Z.C.P., M.R.C. Psych. (Lond.), D.C.H.