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What is 'Quality' Child Care?: Lessons From Child Psychology Research
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19711 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
7,259 Words |
| Author
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Karl Zinsmeister
Karl Zinsmeister is a an Ithaca, New York, writer and adjunct
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is currently
at work on a book about the state of American families for
HarperCollins publishers. |
The first thing to be said about the intellectual and emotional effects of having millions of American infants and toddlers raised primarily by hired attendants instead of their parents is that we know very little about how things will turn out in the long run. That is the most astonishing aspect of the current dash to more day care. With great haste and very little introspection, we have thrown ourselves into an enormous uncontrolled experiment, using our most important and precious resource--our own children--as the laboratory rats.
A large portion of our next generation is being acculturated by methods never before employed on a mass scale by any human society. Primal links between mothers and infants, between children and homes, are being diminished. Psychological adjustments that some theories of personality suggest are not possible will have to be achieved. It may work out for most children. Or it may produce stresses that last a lifetime. Given the personal and societal stakes, this uncertainty about day care's effects leaves many observers uneasy.
And it is not the uncertainty alone that has caused doubts. In long-standing child-development research and theory, as well as in some of the more recent and refined day-care studies, there is a significant and growing body of evidence that suggests many children who go into all-day surrogate care at young ages will be damaged in one way or another by the experience. In the pages following, I will examine some sources of this concern.
The Withered Children of Institutions
Let's begin by letting our minds drift back about forty-five years, to a time when warfare and strife had slashed at human communities all across the globe. Among its other effects, World War II destroyed a great many families. Large numbers of children became separated from their parents, and governments and charitable agencies made extensive efforts during and after the war to sweep as many as possible of these separated and orphaned youngsters out of the camps and off the streets into clean, safe, and orderly institutions.
When peace arrived, the World Health Organization commissioned a prominent English psychiatrist named John Bowlby--who had made his mark studying the link between early maternal absence and juvenile delinquency--to study the problems of these parent- and home-deprived children. His findings, published in 1951, were startling. Young children raised in institutions, where there were
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