|
Book |
Quote/Comment |
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 56
|
Rather than ask the
big, important questions such as, Are our children thriving or are they
floundering under the new approach to child-rearing?, researchers assume the
children are OK, assume that more quality day care is the benchmark of
social progress, and proceed to the question of how society can best
approach that benchmark.
Category = Politics |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 58 |
In 1976,
Jean-Francois Revel wrote The Totalitarian Temptation. Revel analyzed
the rhetoric and methods of the advocates and apologists of communism. The
methods he described are strikingly similar to the methods used in this
country to support the idea that full-time childcare is the preferred
alternative to parental care and that children are “just fine” with minimal
input from their parents
Category = Politics |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 60 |
The idea of
childhood has been so thoroughly upended that it is the “new normal” to put
babies into day care centers…
Category = Politics
|
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 70 |
The American
experiment with day care has been like the trying on of a new hat, way too
large, and insisting that it fits because it only comes in one size. We have
insisted that babies and infants are ready for group environments because it
is the only conclusion our modern agenda permits.
Category = Politics |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 74 |
The opportunities for the baby to attach to one special person
are obviously less if he or she is subject to a series of caregivers and
even less if she is subject to the crowed and turbulent world of day care
where many other children compete for adults' attention and where the job of
care giving by its nature, prohibits the care giver from treating one child
as "special." Professor Alice Sterling Honig argues that day care workers do
not usually make good surrogates for parents because of this fact. Care
givers, she warns, "cannot by their cheerful daily ministrations substitute
for that intense intimate relationship between a parent and child."
Category =
Quality |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 77 |
Leach* further
intones:
An outside care giver has less
reason than a mother to celebrate an infant and therefore needs less cause
to be indifferent to him. A nursery worker has less reason still to
celebrate this infant because she has others to care for who may overload
her or whom she may prefer.
*Penelope Leach, famous British child care expert
Category = Quality
|
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 87 |
Megan Gunner,
Director of the Human Psychobiology Lab at the University of Minnesota, has
found that social relationships control cortisol levels (an indicator of
stress) in infants and young children. “The most profound discovery was that
70-80 percent of children in center-based care show ever-increasing levels
of cortisol across the day, with the biggest increases occurring in
toddlers.
Category = Behavior |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 88 |
Now, with so many
children in day care from infancy, with so many who never had a chance to
attach to their mothers in the first place and who never received consistent
reliable nurturing, researchers are seeing more of the aggressive, uncivil
behavior which is often the result of being insufficiently brought-up and
insufficiently loved. As more and more children enter the ranks of the
institutionally raised, we see more and more children who distance
themselves from others and who harden themselves in order to avoid pain.
Category = Behavior |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 89 |
Children in day
care often exhibit low tolerance of frustration and elevated aggressiveness.
Yale Professor Edward Zigler, in a summary of many studies on day care,
concluded that children raised as such are more immature as adults and tend
toward “assertiveness, aggressiveness and peer rather than adult
orientation.
Category = Behavior |
