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Day-care advocates
like to portray exclusive parental care of children as an historical
anomaly.
"They say mothers have always shared caregiving," Belsky
remarks. "That passes off as intellectual sophistication these days.
What they don't go on to say is that in aboriginal societies where mothers
share caregiving* they do so with networks of blood relatives -- with people
who will know both the parents and the child their whole lives."
By contrast, the current reality of day care
--children cared for by a series of biological strangers who have no
long-term commitment to the child or the parents -- is an experiment unprecedented in human history.
*Belsky's remark does not imply
that mothers share caregiving in all aboriginal societies. It only applies
for the few that do....
-- National Review, "Day careless (dangers of day care to children)",
by Maggie Gallagher Jan 26, 1998
Along the same
lines as Belsky, Dr. Maria Montessori (the world-famous early
childhood educator) wrote, "But let us think, for a
moment, of the many peoples of the world who live at different cultural
levels from our own.
...In almost all countries, the baby accompanies his mother wherever she
goes. Mother and child are inseparable.
...Mother and child are one...no mother ever entrusts her child to someone
else".
-- The Absorbent Mind by
Maria Montessori, translated from the Italian by C.A. Claremont, 1967, pages 104-105 (Chapter
12)
Dr. Peter S. Cook
also confirms Belsky when he wrote, "Large-scale
institutional, long-daycare rearing of babies and very young children by
professionals offering no continuing relationship with them is without
successful precedent in the history of our species".
-- "Rethinking the Early
Childcare agenda" by Dr. Peter S. Cook, Medical Journal of Australia,
1999, 170:29-31
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