Gen-daycare

At NR's Home Front blog, Suzanne Venker has bravely written a piece about the abomination that is daycare: Will America Ever Be Ready for the Truth about Daycare? A bit:

“Academics, pediatricians, and other experts have learned to keep a prudent silence about the risks of day care, and so it is the daycare advocates — and only the advocates we hear from on our television screens and in our parenting magazines,” writes Diane Fisher, P.D. Which means one would have to do serious research to learn the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth when it comes to daycare. And most people just aren’t going to do that.

The media aren’t the only guilty party — the publishing industry is just as bad. That’s why authors such as May Saubier won’t get her excellent tome, Doing Time: What It Really Means to Grow Up in Daycare, published in the traditional manner. Heck, she won’t even get it past an agent. Not just because she has no “platform”– a fancy term for a ready-made audience — but because Ms. Saubier, who has a master’s degree in Special Education and has worked in daycare since she was 16, shares information we’re not supposed to talk about. One of the agents to whom she submitted her work had this to say in response: “Though there are some promising elements to the proposal, we are not convinced the major publishers would support it. Try addressing some alternatives to daycare in order to give your book a more constructive outlook.”

Alternative to daycare? Um, that’s kinda obvious: It’s called staying home with your kids. Provide a constructive outlook? Um, well, that would mean lying. Lying to get a book sold. Thankfully, some authors write for the right reasons — May Saubier is one of them.

Read the whole thing. Ms. Venker, drawing from Ms. Saubier's book, looks at daycare through the lens of whether it's good for the children. That seems to me the critical question for parents:

# A baby who spends five years at one center will lose one-third to almost half of her caregivers every twelve months or so. At any given moment, a parent’s baby could be in the arms of someone they don’t know well, or someone they have never met at all. Children in daycare are frequently cared for by strangers.

# I am asking parents to think about the amount of attention they pay their infants and toddlers when they are home with them on the weekends — then divide this attention by the number of children in your child’s daycare. At best, this is the amount of attention your little one can expect to receive.

# A day spent in daycare begins with abandonment. Staff members are prepared for this and employ many strategies to lessen the daily blow.
When parents are told their children are miserable all day, every day, this does not speak well of the daycare center. That is why parents often hear a rose-colored version of how their child’s day is actually progressing.

And so on. Now read Greg Pollowitz's dismissive, unsupported response. (It won't take long.) Apparently traditional child-rearing has become so marginalized, and relegating babies to daycare so culturally entrenched (one of Venker's points), that arguments for raising one's own children merit nothing more than a sneer, even from an NR "family" blogger.

Contrary to what Mr. Pollowitz thinks, all "caregivers" are not created equal, and merely asserting that one is as good as another won't make it so. Children need and deserve to be raised by people who know them, love them, and won't suddenly disappear from their lives. "Oh, please" seems an inadequate response to such a weighty matter. Has he ever heard of attachment? If not, this is a good place to start.

From an older post of mine:

This just in: Daycare is bad for high-need babies

Daycare workers are hirelings who neither love nor know their charges. That's not their fault; they aren't their parents. Some daycare employees like kids a lot, which helps, and others aren't crazy about dealing with kids all day, but prefer it to the alternative: manning the fry machine at MacDonald's.

In cases when children do form a bond of affection and trust with their keepers, it can't be counted on to last. Turnover is high. Too bad for the eighteen-month old who goes to "school" on Monday and finds that Miss Laurie is gone and is never coming back. Kids can experience grief, too, when they "graduate" into an older room and lose that special person. This happens routinely in a KinderCare-style institution and those losses accumulate over the years. No one really pretends this is the best way to raise children.

Daycare workers will tell you that Mondays and the first days back after several days' absence are frustrating for them because the kids are extra whiny and tearful. Home is where their hearts are.

Strep, influenza, pink-eye, norovirus, rotavirus, hand-foot-mouth disease, impetigo, and more spread rapidly in the daycare setting. Some centers are better than others at cleaning and practicing disease-preventive measures, but it's a losing battle. Sick workers can't always afford to take a day off without pay. And anyway, they're needed by the center to keep the ratios within legal limits.

Sensitive, irritable, rough, or otherwise difficult kids get the worst treatment because they need the most patience and care from their "teachers," not all of whom are able to do so with a smile. Quiet, compliant kids also lose in this situation, getting whatever scraps of time and attention aren't consumed by their more demanding peers.

Oh well, parents and caregivers say; kids are so resilient!

Turns out some of them aren't.

See also: The Pleasure of Infants 

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Greg Pollowitz offers a more fleshed-out anecdotal defense of daycare and Julie Gunlock writes a perfectly on-target post about absentee parenting, the nanny state, and childhood obesity.

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