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?!

fabsum, it seems obvious to me that fulltime childcare for children under 2 will be beneficial to some children, neutral to others, and harmful to others, depending on their starting age, length of hours, personality, quality of care, family environment etc.

If we are all so in love with the Swedish system, let's all just move to that. Problem solved.

Instead you insist a longitudinal study that will take decades to prove something that is almost impossible to prove negatively on a large enough scale to be reliable, as a pre-condition to the government providing a service to working mothers on a wide scale.

Really, it says more about what you feel about fulltime nursery than genuinely trying to be constructive.

Personally, I would rather my taxpayers money be spent on studying whether foster care provided under the current system is better or worse than removing children from deprived homes on the grounds of emotional abuse. Far more devastating issue in terms of harm to the individual child.

"fabsmum - you have used a lot of emotive language to describe nursery care in your posts,"

Ok - I made one comment about children being looked after in small 'herds'. It was in response to the comment below. What other 'emotive' language did I use? Can you cut and paste please?

And how does that compare to this? "i await the mummy martyrs beating me with hand made tampons as they berate me that they haven't bought new clothes in 7years and have shoulder skelfs carrying that damn rugged cross?" and various other sniping comments casting aspersions on the values and character of people who are concerned about nursery care.

" you have extrapolated your bad experience to a sweeping generalisation to include all nurseries"

Er - I haven't! I have said two or three times that all three of my children have attended other nurseries which are really excellent. My youngest is currently attending a children's centre nursery which provides outstanding care.

"and have completely ignored the fact that children who have a number of siblings and who are cared for with by their mothers fail to get their emotional and physical needs met 100% of the time."

No I haven't ignored this point at all. I said that it's especially difficult to meet the needs of two or three babies at once - which is something we all acknowledge when we think about parents of multiples. Children of different ages have different needs and relate to their care givers in different ways. I never insinuated or said that babies cared for at home get 100% of their attention all the time. Of course they don't.

There is a large Swedish nursery just near my DD's school. The Swedish children play in the same park and playground as my DD's school does and we often bump into groups of small Swedes in the street or walk past their very small courtyard playground. The nursery is housed in the Swedish Church complex in Paris.

They are the quietest large group of children I have ever encountered. Everbody remarks upon this - and this is in France, where children don't generally shriek and run wild. But I cannot draw a single conclusion from this.

Can't be bothered to read the thread, but just because what Biddulph says is inconvenient doesn't make it wrong.

Babies need one to one consistent care. You can't get that in a nursery. If you have to put them in a nursery, bad luck. Doesn't change their needs, no point pretending otherwise.

I agree with blueshoes. I think we're going round in circles here.

I muse to myself.

Whenever a person looks back on their childhood, if they have to allocate blame, they tend to blame the parenting they received for their current mental health.

I present you with the book of Oliver James about Parents: They F* You Up: How to Survive Family Life, another wanker author IMO.

He lays the cause of poor mental health on poor parenting.

Now this concern about mental health timebomb which some of you imply arising from widespread nursery use ... perhaps our time and effort would be better spent educating the public on improving parenting methods instead.

Biddulph or Oliver James? Take your pick.

"fabsum, it seems obvious to me that fulltime childcare for children under 2 will be beneficial to some children, neutral to others, and harmful to others, depending on their starting age, length of hours, personality, quality of care, family environment etc."

Err.. yes. I haven't said anywhere that no children should be cared for in group care. I live in a very deprived area where there are children who are quite clearly worse off at home with than they would be in full-time good quality nursery care. That's not the same as saying that full-time instutitional group care is appropriate and beneficial for most or even many babies. I've also said that part-time nursery care for older children is a good thing on the whole.

"If we are all so in love with the Swedish system, let's all just move to that. Problem solved."

Yes please.

"Instead you insist a longitudinal study that will take decades to prove something that is almost impossible to prove negatively on a large enough scale to be reliable, as a pre-condition to the government providing a service to working mothers on a wide scale."

Er - where have you got this stuff about me 'insisting' on expensive and long term research as a 'pre-condition' of providing a this type of childcare to working mothers? I said nothing of the sort, and I wouldn't! I would like the research to be done. That's not the same as saying 'refuse to fund care until the research is done'!

Really - why do you need to make up stuff like that and then attack me for it?

blueshoes - does it have to be one or t'other?

Here in France it is very easy to identify aspects of school that contribute to poor mental health in adult life (and the French do not have good mental health - there is a lot of low level depression here relative to other developed countries).

YANBU - a toddler group should be a place where all types of mums can support each other & their choices. DS goes to nursery part-time - I didn't look at studies or take any account of experts. If I'd made the choice not to, I would have done it from my own instincts as well. Not because I think 'I always know best' but because nurseries vary so much, children vary so much, so any study couldn't be comparing like with like. Unless they'd studied children of DS's temperament at the actual nursery he was going to, I'd always take it with a pinch of salt.

I made the decision that the individual nursery I chose was a good environment for my individual child. Studies can so easily be mis-leading or generalised. I mean this study doesn't mean that my DS won't (god forbid) get leukaemia, or that a SAHM's child will. And a study showing stress hormones in totally different children in a different nursery to the one DS attends doesn't tell me much either. But if DS was unduly stressed at nursery I would know and would take him out. I say 'unduly' stressed because I don't think it's right or normal to expect a stress-free life, even for a two year old. Some measure of challenge - learning to share, learning to play with others etc. is a useful thing, but probably does raise their stress hormone levels. So in some ways, the research Steve Biddulph quotes doesn't surprise me. DS used to get plenty stressed as a toddler when someone was playing with the toy he wanted, and that happens a lot at nursery.

HG what rot - so what about people who have more than one child? I am due my second DC in December - is my baby going to miss out because i have DS1 to look after as well? What about people with multiples - are their babies lacking? I don't think so.

Stig - Owing to your extraordinarily literal interpretation, further engagement on this is likely to prove fruitless. Enjoy.

fabsmum, that was a rhetorical question. No need to answer .

You are right - I misinterpreted you as saying the study is a precondition of funding. I am all for studies. I just wonder how you are going to reliably show harm, neutrality or benefit to babies in ft nursery care, even applying scottishmummy's requirements for a longitudinal study.

Short term effects like aggression in pre-school children don't necessarily stay with a child - almost all children grow out of it. There is the question of how damaging are raised cortisol levels, which could be an indication of healthy stimulation or something worse. Can you measure changes in the brain against a control?

It is the long term effects on mental health which I suspect is the crux of the issue. But it is impossible to isolate that from early childcare experiences because the bulk of input into this is in fact parenting over the next decade or so of that child's life.

I would be interested in the results of that study. We already know about attachment parenting, which I practise in a lite form. Now let's finally have some proof.

Biddulph and Oliver James have very similar views about early child care.

We cannot do longitudinal, intervention, RCT studies on babies and small children and I don't see anyone asking for these.

What we can do is retrospective studies, and control for variables (socio-economic factors, length of time in nursery, age of infant/child). We can also look at what we know are the emotional, psychological, physical, cognitive needs and development of infants/children, and see what sort of care meets these needs.

This is, more or less, what Penelope Leach does in her new book

www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745647005

This places the child care question in the social, political realm - it's something we should take seriously as a nation, rather than an individual choice made by individual parents. If parents have no choice but to place their infants and young toddlers in a poor quality nursery then that is a scandal. Blaming the parents in this situation is pointless. We should be blaming the nursery and looking at provision, funding, training and parenting support instead.

Full time day care for small babies is, generally speaking, unable to meet their very particular needs. It's only ever a good thing in itself if the parent care alternative is unworkable. This is not the same as saying all small babies will be harmed by full time day care.

becstarlitsea's post also reminded me. A lot of whether and how badly children get stressed in a situation, depends on their temperament. Some babies are laid back and don't seem to mind who looks after them. Others, like mine, are more focused on their mother and get bad separation anxiety. Then again, some laid back babies turn into monster toddlers and some difficult babies calm down once they get mobile and more control over their bodies.

All this will certainly affect the results of the study. Can you isolate and control factors like temperament for the purposes of the study?

Thanks for that link tiktok - I shall buy that. I have huge respect for Penelope Leach.

And snort at hully gully Blinkered POV at all?

There's no POINT in denying the obvious because it doesn't suit. It's ultimately unhelpful because it obviates the necessity to find a solution that does work.

hullygully - you sound like an evangelist. Biddulph's viewpoint is simply that. There is no empirical evidence to suggest he's right. It may strike you an argument that corresponds with your worldview so feels more right to you but that doesn't make it so. You sound rather arrogant IMO - there have been some quite robust rebuttals of his POV on this thread but, as you said, you've haven't bothered to read it so you wouldn't know.

HG - LOL - you make me laugh.

It is self-evident that the solution is to invent a way of cloning the mother.

Failing which, move to Sweden.

Swedes are clones deeply conformist - I think you have identified the key point here, blueshoes .

Okay, let's try kibbutzes - they were a big success, weren't they?

I'm not evangelical or arrogant, just old and tired. It's not just this specific debate, it's the general denial of self-evident best practices because they are inconvenient.

Theories of child-rearing have swung about wildly over the years as we all know, so why not use the evidence of our own eyes and instincts and the stuff that spurts from our bosoms?

Anna, you might find a comment in the link posted by Juuule's further down on 'Early Years - How the Swedes do it' interesting.

If you scroll down to about the half-way mark of comments, there is one from a British man who lives in Stockholm. He observes that culturally, Swedes have a respect for fairness and moderation which in turn leads to conformism, a factor in how their society works (paraphrasing badly). Interesting to read.

hullygully, you make me laugh as well.

"Stuff from my bosom"? pmsl! Keep it coming.