Raising Babies: Should under 3s go to nursery?. Steve Biddulph
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‘Many children have been in my care since they were three months old. Part-time places are not cost-effective, so many are with us from 8 am to 6 pm, five days a week, and so spend the majority of their waking time with me and my colleagues.
‘It is unthinkable that any child in our nursery would not receive immediate comfort and reassurance if they needed it (as was sadly the case in the documentary), but I am aware that many nurseries never engage emotionally with their children, maintaining a professional detachment. One nursery manager I know instructs her staff not to hug crying children because “it will make them soft”.
‘Nurseries have become big business. Large corporate structures are proliferating, with groups of nurseries being run from remote head offices where profit-driven, sales-oriented teams allow individual managers little say in the running of their nurseries.
‘One (ex-retail) director of such a chain revealed that his ambition was to create a strong “brand”, so that if you walked into any one, you would instantly know it was his. Everything would be the same: identical decor, identical staff uniforms, standard-issue toys. What has this to do with the care of children? It is not good practice, and yet it is awarded stars for excellence. Nursery owners, OFSTED inspectors and parents are obsessed with appearances, and the essence of good childcare is being lost.
‘It has been one of the saddest aspects of my career that not once – not at college or on any training course – has anyone ever mentioned the primary importance of emotional security and happiness in the development of a small child. Many staff (and parents) are insufficiently informed to understand that many demands we make of small children are unrealistic.’
Perhaps this is just one person’s minority view? It appears not – similar comments came from no less a person than Rosemary Murphy, the head of the National Day Nursery Association, which represents more than 3,000 private nurseries. Rosemary told the Guardian newspaper:
‘I am concerned that Britain is stumbling into changes about how small children are cared for without anything like the kind of informed public debate necessary. There’s a woeful lack of public debate. We need to look at this whole question very carefully for two reasons: firstly, because it is fundamental to get child development right, and secondly, because we need to think about what childcare should look like: are we developing the right kind of system?’3
Coming from someone who represents the industry, these frank comments have to be a source of real concern.
In a nutshell
Visit a day nursery: your own senses will tell you that it is a difficult and less than ideal place for an under-three-year-old child. It lacks the kind of focus or empathy that is needed for a young child to feel loved, or grow and learn well.
A nursery director says that coldness and uncaring behaviour is widespread across Britain’s nurseries. The industry’s spokesperson herself is deeply concerned about where nurseries are going.
Childhood today is nothing like it was for preceding generations, especially for very young children. In 1981, only 24 per cent of mothers returned to work before their baby was one year old. Today the figure is over 60 per cent. (Of course, 95 per cent of fathers return to work too.) As a result, almost a quarter of a million UK children under three attend a day nursery full- or part-time.
Worldwide, the number of babies and toddlers spending all day in nursery care has quadrupled in just ten years. Daycare was originally intended for three- and four-year-olds, but its use has spread downwards; sometimes babies are now put into nurseries and crèches when they are just days old. The hours have got longer too: millions of children under three are in daycare centres ten hours a day, five days a week in America, Australia, Brazil, Japan and other industrialized countries across the globe.
This large-scale group care of the very young is a recent thing. It has happened without prior research or understanding (compared with, for instance, the invention of kindergarten, which was specifically designed with child development needs in mind). If it turns out that early childcare is a damaging thing, then millions of lives will have been adversely affected. As we will see later, the chemistry of these children’s bodies and even the structure of their brains may well turn out to be different – but not in good ways.
Two kinds of nursery user
In the past it was hard to find accurate statistics about the extent of daycare. Statistics for children under three often did not specify how early it began, and for how many hours a week. Finally, in the late 1990s, some of the statistics were ‘disaggregated’ – that is, broken down to see if there are different types of choices hidden away in the ‘average’ figures. A remarkable discovery was made – there are two distinct patterns of nursery care usage that indicate two different sets of parenting beliefs and values.1 In private, childcare researchers have come to call these two groups ‘slammers’ and ‘sliders’.
Slammers are parents who ‘slam’ their child into nursery care as early in life as possible, and for as many hours a day as they are permitted. This can be from as early as 7 am until 6 pm or even later, usually for the full working week. These parents are essentially only with their babies at night-time and weekends. This group has begun to be studied extensively, and they have proven to be very consistent. Slammers usually place their babies in a nursery well before they are six months of age, and once there, tend to keep them there, full-time, until the child starts school. That means their children spend over 12,000 hours in a nursery before their fifth birthday. (This is more hours than they will spend in the schoolroom in the following 12 years – an astonishing amount of time.) While slammers might deny it, the choices they make essentially say: ‘This child does not come first in my life – it fits around my life. My career/income/social life/education are the defining factors of my time and energy.’ Slammers are only a small group – less than 5 per cent of parents. That is a small percentage, but it’s still a lot of children – approximately 100,000 out of the UK’s 2 million under-threes, and the number is growing, especially among urban professionals. It is a lifestyle that is often represented in magazines, and by corporate propaganda, as the ideal and desirable lifestyle, influencing others to see this as the norm.
Morning delivery
It is just after 7 am, and I am taking an early morning run in a town I am visiting for a few days. Turning down a leafy side street to get away from the noise and smell of traffic, I come across a rather posh nursery behind a big fence. A sign announces that it offers ‘early learning opportunities’ for children from birth to five. I pause for breath and study the sign, noticing the hours – 7 am to 7 pm each day. Suddenly I am startled by the sound of tyres skidding on gravel. A large four-wheel drive vehicle mounts the kerb just feet from where I am standing, so close that it makes me jump backwards. It comes to an abrupt stop, rocking on its springs. A frowning, smartly-dressed man leaps out, slams his door, strides around the car and pulls out a bundle from the back seat, from which I can just glimpse a tiny baby’s face peering out. The man barrels through the childproof gate and into the centre. In less than a minute he is out again and the car screeches away. The whole thing is like a cash drop at a bank. Maybe he is having a really bad day. I hope that’s what it is, and not just another morning. In either case though, I would hate to be that baby.
Sliders, by contrast, are parents who only place their children into nursery care gradually, and often much later – perhaps not until they are aged two or more – and usually for much shorter periods of time each week. This is closer to what child development theory would advise. (For more detail of what is appropriate by age and gender of child; see the Appendix at the end of this book.) Slider