In the silly quiz below,
Rachel wonders: “Isn’t circle 7 a bit harsh for daycare?!”. Hmmm, um, no. I think daycare for babies is pretty despicable. Before I have people throwing rotten fruit at me, I know there are situations where it is perhaps necessary for survival. Even then though I do not think it is ideal and the lesser of two, or however many, evils. With that said, when I worked in a daycare infant room, there was not one family I saw there that could not afford to spend that precious time at home with their babies.
If no one will believe me, so here are a few excerpts from some articles and decide for yourself:
…Her travails began with a well-regarded day care center near her suburban New Jersey home. On the surface, it was great. One staff member for every three babies, a sensitive administrator, clean facilities. “But when I went in,” Frank recalls, “I saw this line of cribs and all these babies with their arms out crying, wanting to be picked up. I felt like crying myself.”…
But physical dangers and out-andout abuse are not the major problems associated with substitute parenting. Despite the screaming headlines, these are fairly unusual occurrences, thank goodness. The commoner, deeper drawback is simply that it is an emotionally unsatisfying substitute for the natural attentions of mother and father. From a youngster’s perspective, the typical day care arrangement is a puzzling, often chilly, slightly sad arrangement. Unfortunately, very few discussions of day care look at things from that angle. “We could do with another Charles Dickens,” suggests family historian John Sommerville, “to give us a child’s-eye view” of the world of day care…
A public school teacher and former day care worker I corresponded with a few years ago made a similar point:
Parents who use day care tend not to develop the kinds of parenting skills, or the self-confidence in dealing with their children, that seem to me to be necessary…. Since we were in charge during most of the children’s waking hours, parents had very little opportunity to develop…. As a result they were generally nervous around their children, and impatient with the various unpleasant aspects of caring for them.
William and Wendy Dreskin operated such a center in San Francisco for five years. Its ratio of children to workers was low. It had ample equipment and an excellent curriculum. Teachers all had degrees plus at least a year of graduate training.
In their book, “The Day Care Decision,” they wrote, “For two years we watched . . . children respond to the stress of separation from their parents with tears, anger, withdrawal or profound sadness, and we found, to our dismay, that nothing in our own affection and caring for these children would erase this sense of loss and abandonment.”