To think toddler group shouldn't be handing out such anti nursery literature?

[Ebb]

I have recently started going to a toddler group, run in a church, which is, in general, lovely but today we were all handing print outs of 'Raising Babies' by Steve Biddulph entitled 'Should under 3's go to nursery?'

It basically suggests that babies under 1 shouldn't go to nursery at all. "Organize for your baby to be with a parent or Grandparent all the time except for occassional breaks - days off or evenings out - when you have a trusted and familiar babysitter."

When your child is one "up to one short day per week eg. 9-3 with a trusted and familiar carer. Ideally 1:1 but in a 1:3 ratio at most."

Further quotes include "Some children are not ready (for nursery) until three or more and group care can be upsetting and harmful for these children." and "*Remember - nurseries have become big business. Many nurseries never engage emotionally with their children."

I am lucky in the fact I take my Dc to work with me but a lot of parents don't have a choice and nurseries are the feasible option. Surely a toddler group shouldn't be putting more pressure and guilt on parents by handing out such cr@p?!

It was Harriet.

"His tongue-in-cheek advice to parents is: 'Don't raise your child in a closet, starve them, or hit them on the head with a frying pan.'"

Big - this is my new parenting mantra lol.

Fuzzy - you told us that all children who attend nursery under two were brats. We were rightly offended by that but are not allowed to criticse your opinion?

DaddyJ, my knowledge of neuroscience is second hand, I have to say - I read it in so far as it affects parenting and child development. But my understanding is that there has been fruitful research in the past 15 years, and especially the last 10.

There are some references here that give a flavour of the links being made.

I dunno...the closet-starving-frying-pan quote is amusing and I daresay reassuring, but it's a mite too facetious for me. It lets a lot of sub-standard childcare off the hook.

modern psychotherapy has acknowledged that if the parental attachment is consistent and robust and the mother a good container who can ameliorate distress that a child can attend day centre with no adverse affect.but with in psychotherapy the arguments rage long and historically and Melanie klein and anna feud ideologically disagreed

winnicott advocated the "good enough" mother,not perfect just good enough. Klien,Bion et al all acknowledge that if the (m)other is robust and caring the child will flourish

the psychic environment a child grows up in has more impact and relevance than whether it attended childcare.one can still have absent mother who was SAHM .the absence can emotional not just proximity

and yes psychotherapy and neuro-sciences is a particularly interesting topic.

"Nurseries as such are not appropriate for young children.
Which is Biddulph's position and why I don't take him seriously.
I have a lot of time for Pe Leach so would love to find out more about her reservations"

But Their reservations are roughly the same: that babies and very tiny children need one to one care from a single, consistent care-giver with whom they have strong emotional engagement, and that this is difficult to achieve in an institutional setting.

One of the problems with the argument that nurseries are unnatural and therefore obviously worse for babies, is that there is absolutely zilch natural or traditional about isolating a woman in a house with a baby for 40 hours a week, and expecting the perfect nurturing environment for infants to result.

Communal societies, which ARE traditional, are not Nirvana either. The alpha famale is very likely to take her child's part and undermine/over-punish the others, and many parents find it hard to stand up to that every time, or even most of the time. I should know; I lived in one for a few years as a kid, and that was the main reason Mum decided to leave. I also had a child-minder after school for a couple of years who kept several kids in a tiny dining room for 2 hours after school with nothing but a table, chairs and a TV. Mum had little money and had to work - no choice back in the '80s - but to pretend that a childminder will always offer more personalised care than a nursery is ridiculous. It depends on the minder and the nursery.

There IS no ideal and perfect way to bring up a baby. I think my current situation - Mum living here, we get on wonderfully, she adores my baby and approves of how I bring him up - is as close as possible, but it's definitely infuriating to have your house rearranged in a way you dislike, your childrearing rules ignored when disagreed with, and zero privacy. Basically there's no perfect solution because nothing in this world is perfect, and screaming and shouting that there is, and it's your own, is mere self-validation at others' expense.

I do agree that good, solid research into what the effects are of various methods is called for, but actually I still think a good, loving nursery will be better than an angry, frustrated and/or depressed mother. Resentment and coldness from your mother is presumably more damaging for an infant than warm and affectionate daytime care, followed by loving attention from a parent who actually missed you.

The only debate that makes sense to me is, how can all nursery provision be pulled up to a level that is genuinely excellent? My neighbour sends her little girl to a parents' co-op. It costs the same as any other, but you also have to "bank" a few hours a month. You can do the accounts or IT or admin, cook the organic food, source and keep on top of suppliers and tradespeople, BE the tradespeople (they never need to pay a plumber!) fundraise... or work in the nursery. As a result there is always a parent around, as well as the paid staff, and the ratios are wonderful as that volunteer is not officially counted. The nursery is, unsurprisingly, brilliant and has a long waiting list, but as a model it strikes me as a really, really good one.

It's a shame women can't take their babies to work in our society!

I don't think that the workplace is the appropriate place for babies/children.

Unless you mean that creches should be available in them?

Qally, you say "I still think a good, loving nursery will be better than an angry, frustrated and/or depressed mother. Resentment and coldness from your mother is presumably more damaging for an infant than warm and affectionate daytime care...."

I think there's something in what you say - there is certainly a lot of evidence that mother's mental health and well-being affects babies and children. But the answer is not (or not solely) to whisk these babies away to a nursery, even a good one, for full time substitute care, to 'save' them from the damaging effects of a frustrated, or angry, or mentally ill, parent.

If a mother is depressed or otherwise less able to engage with her baby, then she needs appropriate treatment, support, non-judgemental companionship which models good infant care - and some of that support may include short spells for the baby in a nursery, or some sort of group care maybe with the mother there, sometimes.

a lot of these arguements about nursery V SAHM seem to centre on a SAHM that is depressed and doesn't want to or be able to care for her child properly.

Thats not my experience or any of the mums I knew when I was at home with my 2. Most mums had hard days sometimes, but the majority of the time the mums were happy to be at home and caring for their children.

What about all the SAHM's that are out there and doing a great job? Where do they stand? Or are they all supposed to be smug and self righteous, going by some of the anti SAHM posts I've seen on here?

Enjoyed that post, Qally. How do parents' co-ops work? Is there a website?

fabsmum, the problem I have with Biddulph is that his main perspective is that of a child therapist.
He sees an awful lot of troubled children, looks into their backgrounds and then quickly draws conclusions.
As a result there is a quite a bit of angst about his advice - which sparks off threads like this or the other
one about oversexualisation.
I don't share that level of angst about the world or child-rearing and I don't have that much time for fearmongers.

I like Pe because even though her sympathies clearly lie with Attachment Parenting
she tries hard to build bridges to mainstream/good-enough parenting and her statements
are much more balanced and non-divisive. So even when she takes positions that I am sceptical about
I am prepared to hear her out.

She is also less likely (as far as I have seen) to try and use pseudo-science to support her views.
Unlike quite a few AP-leaning 'gurus'. Latest tiresome example: Stoppard's 'crying is baad' article in the
Independent which caused some minor pushing and shoving in the sleep section.

In that sense, tiktok, I don't entirely agree that it's the media's fault.

Are you on the right thread ssd? I don't think there have been many posts at all on here that even discuss SAHPs. Except for fuzzy and she is clearly a bit unhinged

On Qally's reference to angry, frustrated, depressed, resentful or cold mother, I read that to mean a mother who would prefer to be at work (as I do and mine did but was forced by my father to SAHM apparently for our welfare) rather than doing childcare all her waking hours.

In other words, the bogeywoman who works because she wants to, not because she has to or because she is a single parent.

Such a mother would very well need to use childcare, possibly even ft nursery care to WOHM. Childcare is therefore a necessary consequence to the solution (WOHM), rather than a solution to frustration etc in itself.

I personally feel I benefit from being away from my dcs as much as they benefit from their time in nursery and a break from me/home. It is a nice balance for us as a family.

DaddyJ: I hadn't seen that piece in the Independent, so thanks for pointing to it.

It's here, if anyone else wants to read it

Aside from her gushing compliments to Gerhardt which from your previous posts I can guess you won't like , and the fact you don't feel the research on the permanent effects on neural pathways and so on is strong enough for a doomy outlook, I can't see that there is anything objectionable in it.

Controlled crying and crying it out are parenting behaviours that are totally at odds with what we know about infant development. They do distress the baby. They don't teach the baby anything useful except to 'switch off' his normal responses. CC and CIO are merely fashions, which fail to take into account the baby's capabilities and needs.

Why should parents not need to know that before they decide to leave a baby screaming for hours (and some do....sensible, caring, loving parents, too. Maybe their loving, caring behaviour on other occasions means they are 'good enough' and the bad effects of CC or CIO are mitigated 'enough'. Lets hope so.)

Yes, I do feel some of Bidulphs stuff is like the statistic '99% of serial killers ate bread in the week they committed their crimes, therefore bread must trigger murderous tendencies'. True but not causal.

I really want to see some proper research on this subject - am going to have a strop and end up doing it myself at this rate lol.

Blueshoes - that's exactly what I meant, yes. I don't think a woman who finds the drudgery of babycare 24/7 depresses her needs treatment. I think she needs time away doing something else that doesn't depress her.

ssd, given that I'm a SAHM myself I'm not sure where you draw that from. One (two?) SAHM on this thread HAVE been self-righteous and smug. I would regard that as down to their temperament rather than workplace.

Tiktok I like Gerhardt's work a great deal. Biddulph's I find facile. They're light-years apart in terms of scholarship, IMO. Probably why one is famous and best-selling.

Daddyj I don't know - I'll ask my friend. I have to say that I'd be very confident putting my child in that nursery - it's given her daughter a lot. As a model it seems to have a heap of benefits, not just the reassurance of knowing the place is properly run - it also makes a level of provision affordable that would otherwise be prohibitive for most families.

When you say 'what we know', may I correct that to 'what attachment parenting advocates believe'.
Just to avoid misleading people!

That is the fundamental problem with Gerhardt, Sunderland, Biddulph and all the other AP supporters:
They are not neuroscientists and have misunderstood/misinterpreted the little we know about the brain.
They have been flat out contradicted by neuroscientists and a lot of the actual evidence out there
but they continue propagating a simplistic and incorrect message (Stress = Loss of brain cells = Bad Things).

In fact, stress is natural, normal and can be very healthy, even for an infant.

Ultimately, it's not that big a deal.
In our parenting, we all do what we need to do
and then we can have a hearty debate about it!
What's not to like

I agree with Tiktok on this - of course how we respond to our babies has an effect on the development of our children. Neural pathways are affected - we do know that. Babies do not grow up in isolation. They are social creatures and not surprisingly their brains respond as such.

It is being a unnecessarily sensationalist to say that anybodys says that stress=death of brain cells. I haven't read anything that suggest that brain cells die. The effect of stress is to alter the development of the neural pathways not kill them off, unless you are talking about extreme cases which clearly we are not. Yes of course we all need stress but there is such a thing as too much stress.

Some research shows that leaving a baby to cry is fine so long as you can differentiate between different sorts of crying and respond when there is real need. Other research shows that babies cry less if they are responded to promptly. Either way, leaving a distressed baby to cry isn't great. However, even the best mother, carer or nursery will sometimes not respond appropriately.

What is key, as I said before, is the degree of repetition. Repetition of anything behaviour, good or bad, leads to hard wiring of the brain. None of this research provides conclusive evidence that one approach is all good and the other all bad but I think it would be very naive to assume that how we parent our children doesn't have an impact, even if for most children, it is subtle and lost in the general differences that there are between all individuals.

In the final paragraph, the approach I am referring to is the approach to child care.

Sorry - it wasn't clear.

DaddyJ - my understanding of this area of science is not that stress means a 'loss' of brain cells.

Neicie's post is clearer - the baby's brain (or more specifically the neural pathways of it) develops according to experience, and, overwhelmingly, social and psycho-social experience. Babies flourish best, in their brain development, with another person/other people in their lives to respond to them, to elicit responses, to feedback to them. Babies will work very hard to try to get this interaction from others, and it's certainly one of the functions of crying.

Now - how 'hard' is the 'hard wiring'? How permanently does a lack of brain development in infancy and early childhood blight an individual's social, emotional and cognitive development? That's the area for discussion and research, I would say, not the fact that these effects exist.

The stress thing is biochemical, rather than neurological, and is to do with the effect of 'unregulated' cortisol and other stress hormones.

As you say, DaddyJ, stress is natural, normal and teleolgically speaking, has had and has an important function in keeping us alert and aware of danger - it's how the parent responds to the stress in an infant that counts.

I think you are wrong in dissing Gerhardt and others because they are not neuroscientists. There are fruitful links between neuroscience, developmental psychology, neurophysiology and clinical applications of this knowledge in psychotherapy. Google baby brains infant mental health for details of a conference which brought together these different disciplines.

Still agreeing with you, Tiktok - especially your 3rd paragraph.

The crux of the issue is: what is the level of stress needed to cause permanent changes in the wiring of a baby's developing brain?

We know prolonged and vicious abuse causes this. But short of this, what is the tipping point?

Is it CIO over a few nights or weeks, or detached parenting over months or years or nursery care (quality even) in babyhood? Does temperament come into this.

This question is still not answered AFAIK. The box/starve/frying pan example might be facetious. But let's not swing too far to the other extreme either in terms of assuming risk.

I would think that the tipping point varies from person to person - some people will be more vulnerable to the negative impact of cortisol than others, I'm sure, as we all vary in our reaction to so many hormones. That is why some women get hideous PMT and others don't, for example.

I suppose the problem is that because children are still developing their brain wiring is still changing quite dramatically and would take less poor care to damage them and a lot more good care to put it right. It is always easier not to let the damage happen in the first place than it is to put it right after the event. That is true of a lot of things, not just brain wiring!

I think you have to say that babies are not things to be experimented with, they are people and as such, it would be sensible to be appropriately responsive of them if at all possible. I don't think CIO/CC are responsive enough ime and I don't like the effect it had on my DS1 when I tried it. I wouldn't do it again.

bueshoes - if you google the words I suggested in my post to DaddyJ and get the PDF that comes up about the conference looking at these issues, you'll see your questions are live issues in the field. Including the personality/temperament one - it would make sense that some babies are more resiliant to poor care than others.

There is stuff done on serious deprivation (Rutter's work on the Rumanian orphans - he followed a cohort of babies who were adopted into the UK from the appalling conditions which emerged 15(?) years ago) which shows that you can 'repair' quite a lot of the ill effects if you start soon enough (I think it's something like age 8 mths) and if you are prepared to put in lots of therapeutic care . Getting in 'too late' can be a disaster, and this is why some adoptions break down (not just of Romanian orphans, either).

But it's not always a disaster - some babies are ok, despite terrible neglect.

I wonder if there is a spectrum, even in 'normal', non-orphanage situations.