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How Will Children of the Baby Boomers Grow Up?: Speculation on the Future of Children Raised in Day Care
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14765 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1988 |
6,904 Words |
| Author
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Bryna Siegel
Bryna Siegel is a child psychologist at the Division of
Children Psychiatry and Child Development at the Stanford
University School of Medicine. Since 1975, she has been
involved in research on infant day care and is the author of
The Working Parents' Guide to Child Care and a forthcoming
revised edition, titled The Day Care Source Book. She has
lectured to parents and professional audiences on the effects
of day care and day-care policy. |
The very early day care of infants may have a pervasive effect on all their subsequent development as children. Of special concern is the growing number of infants entering full-time care as early as six to twelve weeks after birth. How do infants and preverbal toddlers form relationships and get their needs met, especially in day-care centers? What does growing up in a non-home setting teach children to feel and believe about the way the world operates? How will spending so much time in a non-familial group with so many different care givers affect a child's psychological development? Will day-care children be emotionally healthy or have psychic scars? Will day-care children have the same social values as their parents who were raised in nuclear families? How will the children of today's baby-boomer parents ultimately feel about intimate relationships, marriage, their own children, and the way they were raised?
Current patterns of day-care use and the push for a national policy on day care have arisen largely from recent social and economic changes to the family and in the workplace. We can see how critical an issue day care has become by looking at the current presidential campaign. The candidates are vying for attention and votes by promising funds for a national day-care program. This is a 180-degree about-face from the beginning of the Reagan years. In the first year of the Reagan presidency, the national guidelines that assured minimum health, safety, and staffing standard for day care--FIDCR (Federal Interagency Day-Care Requirements)--were never applied, because day-care regulation was seen as an area of unnecessary involvement for the federal government. Before the government gets back in the day-care business, we should ask several questions: What types of day care are best for children of different ages? What are the alternative forms of day care? What is the cost-effectiveness of a national maternal leave policy? How do other western and industrialized nations respond to their day-care problems?
Socioeconomic circumstances have changed rapidly in recent decades. The women's movement of the 1960s encouraged women to spend less time at home and more time on careers. Economic inflation in the 1970s moved increasing numbers of women into the work force, and day care proliferated. In 1975, when I first began to research day care, it was difficult to find infants under one year of age in day care of any kind. By now, in 1988, the majority of American infants are in day care. Despite this trend, there has been very little funding of psychological research on the effects of day care on children, partly because of the absence of federal policy on day care. Nevertheless, in the last fifteen years
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