The warehousing of children in the guise of “care” or, even more implausibly, “early learning” (”That means the blocks have letters on them,” joked one staff member I spoke to recently) is something more and more parents feel distraught about. The research is now undeniable that babies and younger toddlers do not thrive in child care. Yet the business world does not want young parents to have time off work…

In Britain, the Blair government’s attempt at being mother-friendly consisted of building a vast number of new day-care centres. But the news out of Britain in May was stunning.

Almost a quarter - 22 per cent - of the country’s nursery places are unfilled. Day care has gone out of fashion. British families are making the sacrifices that enable them to stay home when their babies are small.

The reason is not hard to find. A slew of research, from large and well designed studies, has found that too much day care harms under threes in several ways. Lacking one-to-one care, the fine interactions between a loving parent or family member and a baby or toddler do not happen…

Care-raised babies don’t all become psychopaths, but they are measurably more anxious, aggressive and disobedient as they move through preschool and the primary grades. We even know why this is so. The stress hormone cortisol, measured in a baby’s saliva, doubles if they are placed in care, and it is still elevated even months after they start…

Britain is now introducing one year’s paid parental leave. But even before the change only 7 per cent of children in British nurseries are under one, and only 18 per cent of these go full-time. This follows the pattern in Sweden, where parents demanded proper maternity leave in the early 1990s, and got it. In that whole country today, there are fewer than 500 babies in day care. Australia has tens of thousands…

Source: Sydney Morning Herald
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