Beer and Popcorn…Er, no
One of the world’s most popular parenting gurus is to warn that placing children younger than three in nurseries risks damaging their development.
Steve Biddulph, whose books have sold more than 4m copies worldwide, says that instead of subsidising nurseries, which do a “second-rate” job, the government should put in place policies to enable mothers to stay at home with their babies.
The advice signals a reversal of views for Biddulph, an Australian with more than 20 years’ experience as a therapist, whose previous bestsellers
include Raising Boys and Raising Girls.In his new book Biddulph will admit he has changed his mind because of growing evidence of increased aggression, antisocial behaviour and other problems among children who have spent a large part of their infancy being cared for away from home.
He argues that such children may have problems developing close relationships later.
times of london
The principle difference between the Liberal’s childcare plan and the Conservatives is that the Conservatives allows for the possibility that mum might be the best childcare provider for very young children. The poor Liberals, needed to think of something else for the state to do, could not admit this might be the case.
Here’s why: the “hidden agenda” of the Liberal Party (and the NDP) has been to “empower” women to work outside the home. While this has been done in the name of feminism it has also had the consequence of allowing a rapid expansion of the workforce. It has also had the largely unntended consequence of reducing the number of hours children spend with their parents, particularily their mothers.
This was an experiment in child rearing without precedent and undertaken simultanously through most of the West. The hope was that children raised by stangers would have much the same outcomes as those raised by their mothers.
To no one’s great surprise the research - such as that cited by Biddulph - is rapidly accumulating suggesting that subcontracting childrearing does not work.
From a child development perspective this cannot come as much of a shock. In fact, development specialists have been split for a long time as to anyone other than mum caring for young children; but working mums were consoled with what turns out to have been rather bogus research suggeesting that the outcomes for daycare babies and kids raided by mum were, more or less, the same. It turns out they weren’t.
Poor, dumb, Paul Martin in full pander to the professional day care lobby, drank this kool aid and got onboard the whole jobs for the boys (well, girls, actually) national daycare bandwagon.
The altenative is simply beyond the capacity of the politically correct, 80’s feminist mindset which drive the Liberals and the NDP. Yup, it looks like it is better for children for mum to take a few years out of the workforce.
This has huge political, economic and social implications. The most significant of them being that if we want healthy, well developed kids, we are going to have to accept a shift of resources from taxpayers without children to taxpayers with children. Or, and this would be my preferred solution, the reduction of taxes across the board with a coresponding reduction in governmental activity.
In many ways creating a child friendly, family friendly society is the challenge Western governments face in the next few decades. Somehow, as societies, we have to get out birthrates back up to replacement rate or our culture will simply die out. The daycare driven, one and two child families which are stand issue for many in the West are not getting that job done. Thinking seriously about how to raise the birthrate, starting with giving stay at home mums support through three or four children, would be a start.
Written by jay on February 13th, 2006 with
16 comments.
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jay
lrC
Da Zing
#1. February 13th, 2006, at 2:06 AM.
Hey now. You promised there was no social re-engineering in all this. You promised. So now it isn’t that day care is inefficient and unfair but it is actually harmful? Man, Paul Martin was really really evil, then, for creating day care. Thanks for clearing this up.