fairymum here's a few bits, although personally I think the father can do just as good a job as the mother, only problem with that is I think ideally a child should be bf for 2 years, all being well.
Childcare expert Penelope Leach is emphatic that day nursery settings are particularly inappropriate for the very young:
?What is good for most children of three years is not necessarily appropriate for children of thirty months and may be downright harmful to any child of thirteen, let alone three, months. The educational tradition that legitimises pre-school centres has no relevance to infants, and their corporate nature ? so desirable to policy makers and reassuring to parents ? is developmentally inappropriate for them.?
Leach shares Palmer?s view that a baby needs one-to-one care ? even 1:3 is too low where age groups are segregated (as they are in most institutional settings). Hence family care is the most appropriate for 0-3s. Where family care cannot be provided, the best substitute for family care is small-scale care in a home setting.
Other research shows that children suffer when they are removed too soon from their mothers. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation used longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey to demonstrate that children whose mothers were employed full-time when the child was under 5 had reduced chances of obtaining qualifications, were more likely to be unemployed and to suffer psychological distress in early adulthood. Professor Jay Belsky of Birkbeck College has also expressed strong reservations about the increasing use of non-maternal care, particularly for the under-5s. . In his detailed analysis summarising 20 years of research into the impact of daycare he concludes that:
?early nonmaternal care, as routinely experienced on a full- or near-full-time basis, poses risks with respect to the development of aggression, noncompliance, and problem behaviour? and that such care is also ?associated with less harmonious parent-child relations.?
II. Why Parents are Best
Infant and child development expert Stanley Greenspan, in summing up the developmental needs of babies and young children lists the importance of ?An ongoing, loving, intimate relationship (lasting years, not months) with one or a few caregivers in order to develop caring, empathy, and trust.? (6)
Infancy is the stage during which the foundations for trust, empathy, conscience, and lifelong learning are laid down? A child who does not find empathy by the age of three is likely to have difficulty showing empathy towards others. A person without consideration for others has a much greater tendency to drift towards anti-social behavior such as violent crime. (7)
In institutional daycare staff turnover, sick leaves, promotions, vacations, days off, split shifts, lunch breaks etc. make the provision of a consistent mother figure impossible. One study showed 15 new caretakers over 3 months. Additionally, when staff must cope with two or three under 3s at once, there is no way they can simultaneously meet the needs of each. (ask anyone who has twins or triplets.) (8)
?The problem starts at the beginning of life, when the scales are tipped toward a future of trust and love, or one of mistrust and deep-seated rage.?
?A demographic revolution is occurring which may result in future generations that have huge numbers of detached children.? (9)
Loving relationships are the foundation of a peaceful society and are essential for raising the next generation.
Daycare for under 3s puts at risk the development of empathy with its enormous anti-crime potential. Without empathy (fellow feeling) there is no internal check on antisocial behaviour.