|
Book |
Quote/Comment |
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 110
|
Peery laments,
“Exactly how any day-care advocates can read this research, let alone cite
it as proof that ‘children in good quality child care so no signs of harm’
is almost beyond comprehension.” He asks, “Why do day-care proponents use
such misleading tactics?” and concludes:
…they become intellectually dishonest
and distort the research findings. Why else would day-care advocates
continually ignore the consistently negative effects and conditions of risk
inherent in day care, while disseminating disinformation?”
Category = Politics, Quality |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 110 |
Peery correctly
observes that day care is all too often viewed as a solution to an adult
problem. This allows the question of whether day care is optimal for
children to be ignored. Although almost no one contends that day care is
actually beneficial, the question becomes whether we can positively prove
that day care is harmful. Peery insists that this is the wrong question.
We must consider the optimal conditions for raising our children. To do
otherwise is to permit an appalling lowering of standards.
Category = Politics, Quality |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 114 |
(The long-term NICHD study) found that
children with experience in day care centers had a higher incidence of
problem behavior such as aggression bullying, and disobedience. These
findings held up regardless of the child’s sex or family income and
regardless of the quality of the day care center.
Category = Behavior, Quality |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 115 |
The truth is that
even high quality day care centers cannot provide the optimal
conditions for development. A 1985 study by Ron Haskins in the journal
Child Development found that those children who had spent more time in
day care exhibited proportionately more negative effects regardless of the
quality of care.
Category = Behavior, Development, Quality |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 116 |
Day care is by its
nature impermanent and unstable, un-nurturing, and unrelaxing. The NICHD
study found that one-fourth of the children in a regular childcare
arrangement had had that arrangement changed at least once in the twelve
months preceding the study interviews.
Category = Quality |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 116 |
Attempts to make
paid workers as loving and committed as parents are doomed from the start.
One highly touted solution to day care workers’ lack of commitment is higher
pay. But this would require increasing the ratio of children to workers in
order to pay for the salary increase.
…Even if higher salaries were possible, there seems to
be little relation between how much money a worker receives and how much
they will love and commit themselves to a particular child. The
above-mentioned RAND investigation marveled at the fact that “families with
more resources (high earnings, more education, more income, intact families)
do not typically obtain higher quality care for their children than families
with lower resources.
Category = Economics, Quality |
|
Ships Without A Shore: America's Undernurtured Children by Anne
Pierce,
©2008, p. 117 |
Thus, those
childcare advocates who insist that the “child care crisis” can be solved by
more government money miss the point that love and commitment cannot be
bought. Urie Bronfenbrenner, from Cornell, wisely reminded us that it is
impossible to pay someone enough to get them to do for children what parents
will do for free. Dr. Burton White, a nationally known expert on parent
education, believes the childcare industry is a “total disaster area” with
“no feasible way of turning it into a model industry.” He feels there is an
“unbridgeable gap” between the way children should be raised and the
possibilities provide by day care centers.
Category = Economics, Quality |
