|
Book |
Quote/Comment |
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. x-xi
|
…reports that day
care is OK and …does not affect a young child have been loudly proclaimed in
the media and in bold print. Reports that day care is not OK and that young
children suffer…have been acknowledged only in brave little journals. This
is so in spite of the conclusive evidence (almost all hidden from our view)
that day care, especially full-time day care, is generally detrimental to
children’s emotional and intellectual growth and to their development of a
conscience.
Category = Development |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p.
32 |
If parents of triplets were
taxed to their limit, barely able to cater to their babies’ physical and
emotional needs, how could a care giver who lacked the impulse and incentive
of love be expected to do as well or better?
Category = Quality |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p.
41 |
As we shall explore further, studies
touting the “advantages” of out of home care tend to be based upon
disadvantaged children whose parents are less than attentive—who are not
“good enough.” Indeed, many of the children in these studies come from
abusive families where child neglect, swearing, drug use, and promiscuous
behavior are the norm. The magazines pushing these studies, however, all too
often leave out the fact that the children are disadvantaged. Many day care
advocacy articles “showing” day care to be OK are based upon model day cares
having as their clientele such deprived children.
For example, advocates of federal day care typically cite the Ypsilanti,
Michigan High/Scope study. This study, however, was based upon low-income,
high-risk children in highly superior day care centers. The “positive
results” were that the children avoided juvenile delinquency in higher than
expected numbers.
Category = Development, Politics, Quality |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 41 |
Another often referred to study, for
example, is based upon a model infant day care center run by a school of
education for babies between the ages of two and twenty-two months for only
twenty hours a week. When we are not informed that these children spend
twenty or less rather than forty to fifty hours a week away from loved ones,
we are blatantly misled. “Findings” on day care are often based on
financially subsidized university settings where day care centers tend to be
much better than average and where the parents using the centers tend to
have shorter, more flexible work hours. We must insist that the press turn
their skeptical eye toward such “findings.”
Category = Politics, Quality |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 42 |
Many “reports” on
modern childrearing practices go beyond the misrepresentation of facts and
toward the abandonment of common sense. An article I encountered several
years ago insisted that day care was a good thing and used the “dramatic”
results of a new survey to support that claim. Researchers had interviewed
first graders(!)…
Category = Politics |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 47 |
The misleading
reporting of “facts” regarding working women and day care preferences,
especially on television, has tremendous influence upon our collective
consciousness. News is supposed to be “objective”…
Regarding the subject of day care, the media has taken relentless advantage
of its “information-providing” power. Those lobbying to make day care a
federal industry for which we all pay have benefited the most from media
distortions. Day care advocacy groups and their willing partners in the
press leave out essential information about child development, ignore the
diversity within the ranks of working mothers, and distort true working
patterns because they fear funding for day care would be cut if the truth
were out. Distorted statistics regarding how many families “needed” day care
and the distorted impression given regarding how many families saw day care
as a desirable child care “option” were tailor made for the passage of a
national day care bill.
Category = Politics |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 48 |
ABC* was a bill crafted by and for
interest groups. It was not lobbied for by large numbers of parents but by
those who claimed to know what was best for parents. In effect, it bolstered
government support for institutional day care while threatening to put the
home and church-run childcare, which parents tended to prefer, out of
business.
Interestingly, the question of whether day care is good for children, of
whether it is something the national government should actively encourage
and of whether a national bureaucracy was up to the task of “child
development” was kept far in the background by the bill’s advocates. They
and their supporters in the press used language in such a way as to make
government-sponsored day care and “caring for children” synonymous.
*ABC = Act for Better Childcare
Category = Politics |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 49 |
In “Day Care or Parental Care?” Gill
asks, “Should the government actively promote out-of-home care as an
alternative to parental care in the rearing of infants, toddlers and
preschoolers?
Category = Politics |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 49 & 50 |
During consideration of these bills, the
press was firmly behind the ideological stance of the bills’ supporters.
Supporters fed a steady diet of misinformation to the press regarding the
so-called “day-care crisis.”
Did the “crisis” really exist or was an ideology, the credibility and
popularity of which relied upon positive findings about day care, the
underlying motivation for these stories?
Evidence shows there was no chronic shortage of day care…
Category = Politics |
