|
Book |
Quote/Comment |
How Not to F*** Them Up
by Oliver James*,
©2010, p114
*British clinical psychologist, journalist, bestselling book author, and
television documentary producer. and presenter |
...instead of providing day care
the money could have been used to support those mothers who wanted to care
for their babies themselves to do so.
...Instead of hugely expensive shiny new children's centres, instead of
bricks and mortar, the money should have been spent on maximizing the
chances of under-threes receiving l-o-v-e from a single adult, with one carer
per child
Category = Economics, Politics |
|
How Not to F*** Them Up
by Oliver James,
©2010, p114-115 |
If you are a mother who can afford
options, I would urge you to question why you are using day care. Of course
it is true that, while aggressiveness, disobedience, hyperactivity and
insecurity may be a higher risk from day care...
My key point is that day care is based on the misconception that
under-threes enjoy the company of their peers and the failure to grasp just
how important is the undivided attention of a responsive, tuned-in adult.
Day care may dilute creativity...
Category = Development, Quality |
|
How Not to F*** Them Up
by Oliver James,
©2010, p274 |
...there is no evidence that day care is
advantageous to children from middle-class families, and there is
considerable evidence that it increases the risk of dysregulated cortisol
levels, aggression, disobedience and emotional insecurity, especially if the
care is of low quality. Unfortunately, this latter is the norm in the United
States and Britain.
Category = Development, Quality |
|
How Not to F*** Them Up
by Oliver James,
©2010, p277 |
Thus far, results from Britain's Sure Start*
programme have been desperately disappointing, apparently actually leading
to worse outcomes for children from the most disadvantaged homes (such as
low-income single mothers)...
*A UK government child care initiative
similar to the Head Start programme in the United States and is also
comparable to Australia Head Start and Ontario's Early Years Plan.
Category = Development, Quality |
|
How Not to F*** Them Up
by Oliver James,
©2010, p279 |
...where (mothers) are middle-class, in most
cases they leave their child in the company of substitutes who are young
women, usually with much less education and lower IQs than them. All the
evidence on what enables a child to perform well would predict that doing so
would reduce its performance - as it does.
Category = Development |
|
How Not to F*** Them Up
by Oliver James,
©2010, p279 |
That high-quality day care...can improve
cognitive performance in children of low-income families is not a case for
middle-class parents to opt for it.
The fact is, anyway, that most day care is not high-quality. When you put
this together with the evidence you are about to read about the proven
emotional problems caused by day care, there seems no case whatever for
opting for day care if you are a middle-class parent and seeking substitute
care.
Category = Development, Quality |
|
How Not to F*** Them Up
by Oliver James,
©2010, p279-280 |
Cortisol is the stress hormone secreted when a
person feels under threat, leading to fight or flight in animals, and to
aggression or hyperactivity, or withdrawal, in humans. As we shall see, there
is now overwhelming evidence that day care causes children to have abnormal cortisol levels, probably increasing the risk of behavioural problems like
aggression, fearfulness and hyperactivity.
Category = Behavior, Disease |
|
How Not to F*** Them Up
by Oliver James,
©2010, p282 |
That day care and cortisol dysregulation have
been so consistently shown to correlate strongly implies that there is
something about day care which is stressful.
Category = Behavior, Disease |
|
How Not to F*** Them Up
by Oliver James,
©2010, p282 |
Cortisol is known to dampen the immune system and
this may partly explain the well-established fact that toddlers in day care
suffer much more physical illness than those raised at home; of course,
exposure to so many other
children's infections is also a reason. but the worry becomes
considerably greater when you learn the impact of day care on cortisol
levels continues long after early childhood.
Category = Behavior, Disease |
|
How Not to F*** Them Up
by Oliver James,
©2010, p286 |
While it would take a brave politician to say so,
the fact is that violence in the United States grew massively following the
period in which increasing numbers of children were spending their early
years in daycare. There are many reasons for this, but it is at least
plausible that one of them is that day care increased the proportion of the
population that were angry, a key precursor to violence. Indeed, other
studies suggest a connection between adult violence an non-maternal care...
Category = Politics |
