I'd add to that "teach a minimal level of social acceptability to behavior by the age of 2". There's a failure loop of "too annoying for playing with peers, leading to shunning, leading to not learning how to play nicely with others". You don't need to do much to steer children out of that, but you'll likely need to do some.
Plus, children that don't annoy the heck out of you are much easier to love.
So get them used to meeting other kids at an early age. It's great for their social development. Of course individual kids may vary, but it's a good thing to keep in mind.
They won't be perfect, they were raised by imperfect persons after all, but with enough love they'll be ok.
Yes, while often getting fundamentals wrong, e.g. there are millions of two year olds in day care.
You may believe day-care for two year-olds is fundamentally wrong, but there's little empirical evidence to show that children raised in different ways have different outcomes.
At least you should indicate why you believe those millions are being raised wrongly, rather than merely assert it as fact.
In simple everyday terms I'd say small children need love and attention like a plant needs water. They can't get these reliably at day care. But most of us already know this.
I would ask you to take the next step with me. Please acknowledge, the points below can be true sometimes:
- Some Day Care will offer more love and attention than some parents
- Some children who attend poor quality day-care as two year-olds will grow to become just as mature or balanced as most of their their stay-at-home peers.
All I wanted to do is to show that this situation is more nuanced than "fundamentally wrong".
I am afraid I don't subscribe to your morality. At best, it puts the perfect in the way of the good. For many parents, at some point, day-care is surely the best choice available to them and we should not be quick to judge them as bad parents for doing so.
No, that's what I'm arguing against. Parenting manuals are arguing minutiae while children are increasingly being brought up by strangers who don't love them. Of course there are exceptions. So what?
>So this is moving in the right direction.
Aren't you being a bit quick to judge here ;-)
>> Of course there are exceptions. So what?
So then we have move to a discussion about each child's circumstances on its own merits, rather trying to make one size fit all. And I would argue that this is what parents are already doing in their millions. If so many parents are deciding that their kids' best option is day-care I believe this must be correct in the majority of cases.
>I believe this must be correct in the majority of cases.
'At least you should indicate why you believe those millions are being raised [rightly] rather than merely assert it as fact.'
It is inconceivable to me that rules (morality, laws, tradition or whatever) should decide against parents in the large. Evolution has determined that parents will always be the ones most vested in their children's general well-being.
Let me re-formulate my explanation of why daycare is bad:
(1) Small children need love and attention; they also need adult help available; they need to feel secure. (2) Love, attention and help aren't raw undifferentiated qualities. The quality depends on the source. A familiar source which knows the child is required. (3) The anxiety induced by an early childhood separation from such sources is potentially traumatic and long-term.
Therefore, young children shouldn't be separated from their mothers and/or close relatives.
Yes, being abandoned by your parents can be traumatic, but that's not what daycare is. You're attacking a straw man. (The existence of bad daycares notwithstanding; they do exist, are hopefully rare, but should definitely be avoided.)
(1) There's no such thing as a professional parent. It's a relationship. (2) Professionals have expertise in some domain, e.g. heart surgery, but as the article shows, there's no expert knowledge of childcare. There's no prevailing child-rearing philosophy. (3) Professionals are paid significantly above the minimum wage.
>know how to provide the love
No. A mother loves her child, but love can't be provided as a commodity, like complimentary chocolates. Even if a carer tries her hardest, this will fall short, because she doesn't love the child. She's also heavily constrained by having to follow procedures, timetables, attend to other children, and so on.
>Yes, being abandoned by your parents can be traumatic, but that's not what daycare is.
That's exactly what it is: somewhere to put your toddler while you head off to work. Or it's a convenience. But in reality small children need someone they trust and are close to available at all times.
Are parents not constrained? Parents have jobs, households to run, appointments, groceries, etc. I see parents dragging children through shopping malls because the child does not want to come along and the parent does not want to deal with it.
And who are you to tell people who they do or do not love? You have a ridiculously dogmatic view of how people work. Your view is wrong.
Just wait until you have children, and give it a try. If it's a good daycare, children will love it there. (If it's a bad one, find a better one.)
Yes, a mother is constrained by having to look after her other children and the household, but it is an organic set of constraints which is customised to the particular family and has arisen in part out of their previous interactions and out of her family traditions. Furthermore it can be altered (by her). It's not a bureaucratic scheme designed to maximise the convenience and minimise the legal/financial risk to the daycare and its staff.
Yes, there are horrific families and there are no doubt daycare workers who are more affectionate than others. But this doesn't affect the argument.
>And who are you to tell people who they do or do not love?
Who do I have to be? I've merely claimed that daycarers don't love the kids in their charge. I think our great-grandmothers would have known this instinctively and would be horrified at the direction we have taken as a society in this regard.
We live in a prosperous neighbourhood in the UK that has a lot of good daycare centres. Our friends with kids used the same daycare and were very happy. We have only one child and knew that would always be the case, and wanted him to grow up around other children, comfortable being with people other than his parents. We don't have any family living nearby, so asking them to provide daycare wasn't an option. I couldn't give up work, so without daycare my wife would have had to abandon her career. But she really enjoys her job - she didn't want her whole life to be about being a parent, which is good for her mental health (and by extension our son's mental health). Plus the income gives us extra financial stability, and it teaches our son that is normal for a woman to go to work.
On the negative side, we felt we would lose some control over how our son was raised. Indeed, he has played with toys and watched films we didn't really like. In the short run it actually cost us money.
So we started daycare at just 3 hours per week, and gradually (over the course of 4 years) increased that to 20 hours per week. We always ask him whether he likes his daycare, we are engaged with them and we coordinate activities and teaching methods. He has thrived. Of course, we can't say how things would have turned out had we decided a different course, but he's doing absolutely fine. Also, this is just a one-off case, and not some 'proof that it's a good idea to send kids to daycare'.
As parents, it's all about your child, your values, your circumstances, what kind of daycare is available, what alternatives you have, and a lot of other factors. Blanket comments like "daycare is anti-parenting" are unhelpful at best, and harmful at worst.
I don't know what your situation is - whether you even have kids. Perhaps in our situation you would have made a different choice. Perhaps you'd even have been right, and somehow our son would turn out 'better' (whatever that means) if he hadn't gone to daycare. What I do know is at the time of choosing whether to send our son to daycare, your comments would have been hurtful. Feeling like you're being judged by the "good parenting police" often leads to extreme anxiety, and that's rarely in the child's interest.
So if you don't approve of daycare, that's fine. Don't send your kids to daycare. But please keep those opinions to yourself, or at least recognise that blanket advice to all parents in all circumstances in all countries at all times is going to be worthless and probably wrong.
> On the negative side, we felt we would lose some control over how our son was raised.
Of course not all daycares meet the highest standards, and standards can also vary per country. But a good daycare is good for your child.
Don't forget that those circumstances include the decision of whether or not to have children in the first place.
>But please keep those opinions to yourself
That's silly. This is a discussion which you're not obliged to read and I'm not a best-selling author or anything like that. More importantly, in response to lovemenot's request I tried to move beyond opinion and give an explanation. You're free to criticise it on its own merits if you don't like it.
>or at least recognise that blanket advice to all parents in all circumstances in all countries at all times is going to be worthless and probably wrong.
But I did recognise it: 'I'm not arguing that one-size-fits-all; there are many legitimate parenting styles'. Also 'Yes' at the very start.
Btw, using one's own child as an example in a discussion like this increases emotional investment and then it's harder to determine what's true. Better to argue abstractly I think.
It can, depending on whether the moral question is one of fundamental axioms or applications of axioms to objective conditions. That is, if you take as a moral axiom that it is wrong to raise children in ways which cause certain harms, empirically showing day care does not cause those harms would answer whether (under that rule, at least) day care was morally wrong.
OTOH, if you take “day care is morally wrong” as itself axiomatic, it's true that empirical evidence has no role.
> In simple everyday terms I'd say small children need love and attention like a plant needs water. They can't get these reliably at day care.
The first sentence is very loosely true (empirically, even); in the sense in which it is true, however, the second is not in the general sense (that is, it is not true that there is no way care choice for which it is true), though it may be in a naive sense (if one assumes that all parents have I'd a binary choice between day care and Monday care, and then the children are blindly sent to something meeting the definition of “day care” if that option is chosen.)
Good people already know that daycare is bad, even those who use it, even though they can't explain. So yeah, it's axiomatic.
>however, the second is not in the general sense
Au contraire, it's a perfectly true general statement that children can't get love and attention at daycare. From minimum wage, high-turnover staff looking after a large number of kids in a bureaucratically-controlled environment? No way.
Actually I guess most people wouldn't want or expect employees to love their charges anyhow. It would likely be construed as 'inappropriate', as when a teacher hugs a pupil.
> Good people already know that daycare is bad
A bad daycare is bad, a good daycare is good. Do your homework as a parent. It's possible you live in an area where there are no good daycares, but you need to understand that your situation is not universal. But instead of just badmouthing people who are making responsible choices for their children, you could also help create a market for better daycares, you could join the parent committee for the daycare to help improve it, or petition the government to better regulate or fund daycares.
That's a question that can be settled empirically.
> From minimum wage, high-turnover staff looking after a large number of kids in a bureaucratically-controlled environment?
That sounds like a bad situation. It also sounds very little like the daycare my 2-year-old attends.
Small children need love and attention, but they also need social interaction. They can get both at a daycare. And a daycare doesn't have to mean they never see their parents again. I consider 3 days of daycare and parents each working 4 days to be a perfect balance, and I notice a lot of parents doing exactly that. Although different people may have different situations and needs and find a different balance. But the benefits of daycare shouldn't be too lightly dismissed.
There are lots and lots of philosophers who would argue with you here. Morality and facts are disjoint sets to some.
> while often getting fundamentals wrong, e.g. there are millions of two year olds in day care.
I'm personally really happy with our arrangement: I work 4 days, my wife works 4 days, and 3 days of daycare. We get to spend plenty of time with the kids, but we also have a (practically) full-time job and the kids get lots of time to play with other kids.
I'd be more worried if millions of two year olds were not going to daycare.
There's this trend in parenting nowadays, where we're all pursuing perfection via different techniques / philosophies, but anything involving living things, especially humans, is inherently messy / imperfect. Raising children is no exception.