WHAT'S BEST FOR THE CHILD?
Conniff, Dorothy
What's Best for the Child? BY DOROTHY CONNIFF In less than one generation, we have completed a revolution in American attitudes about child care and the value of home care. Just a few short years...
...Inexperienced staff tend to fall back on their only model for dealing with groups of children: the elementary school...
...Learning to pose questions and receive information that is satisfying is a key social as well as intellectual experience in a child's development...
...In 1970, about a third of mothers of preschoolers were out working...
...And this is the most consistent drawback of daycare centers where staff are overloaded and inexperienced...
...They are more amenable to groups, but without skilled staff they also suffer...
...When children under three are put into impoverished or chaotic environments with inexperienced, discouraged staff who expend most of their energy just trying to maintain order, the children suffer...
...If you allow an extra two-and-a-half minutes at each changing to put them down, clean up the area, and thoroughly wash your hands, you can get by with forty minutes for sanitizing...
...A poor-quality preschool is an ugly, boring, depressing place that creates pain and waste...
...Some is mental, because of the continual frustration of basic developmental impulses...
...They stop expressing their questions and eventually they may stop thinking them up...
...If their world is structured so that formulating and getting answers to questions is difficult or impossible, the developmental process is seriously damaged...
...That is a loax, and a serious one, because few par-:nts have the ability to judge a center's juality for themselves...
...But she was afraid she'd be fired if she missed any more work to look for other Dorothy Conniff, head of the municipal day-care assistance program in Madison, Wisconsin, has worked in this field for sixteen years...
...What do you do in school each time an activity changes...
...They cannot make sense of words alone...
...This is not the case...
...Obviously, such a schedule is not realistic...
...They also will not get the kind of attention and talking-to that is the foundation of language development...
...But the ratios, ironically, end up as the basis for depriving the most vulnerable families of their right to choose how to care for their children...
...Real teachers of young children know that a child's serious question is often not easy to answer— the answer depends on the teacher's powers of observation and skill in negotiating for more information...
...Some of their pain is physical, because toddlers need to move around a lot...
...In less than one generation, stay-at-home motherhood has changed from the foundation of our freedom into a luxury of the idle rich...
...Last year, Tommy Thompson, the conservative Republican governor of Wisconsin, justified his successful initiative for "welfare reform" by asking: If middle-class women cannot afford the luxury of staying home with their children, why should we allow welfare mothers to do so...
...After three years or so of absorbing t phenomena of the world, experimenti and assimilating, children start to pose questions...
...If a child is deprived of language stimulation for eight to ten hours a day, how much compensation—how much "quality time"—can concerned parents provide in the baby's few other waking hours at home...
...A young mother had that day gone to pick up her sixteen-month-old daughter at the day-care home...
...I saw this happen once in a grocery store when a child asked a seemingly straightforward question about a baby riding in a shopping cart...
...This kind of solution to the problem of what to do with young children is a terrible waste of their time...
...Group care is almost as new a service for toddlers as for infants...
...They have learned the forms of questions before, but they were of the "Why, why, why...
...The mother said she'd had suspicions for a long time that things "were not the best...
...Whatever children can learn from pasting a picture of a pumpkin on a pumpkin outline is not enhanced the next day by pasting a paper feather on a turkey...
...When she arrived a little early, a four-year-old answered the door...
...they need to touch and heft objects, move through space, put two things side by side...
...And some is emotional, because of the constant disapproval which the child is powerless to correct...
...In group infant care based on even this four-to-one ratio, babies will not be changed every two hours and they will probably not be held while they're fed...
...The results are comical and predictable—babies wander off, sit down and stare into space, cry—and staff lose patience...
...What's not so comical is that this kind of distressingly inappropriate expectation and the impatience, disapproval, and un-happiness that result are the chronic daily experience of the children...
...And if you think about thoroughly washing your hands sixteen times a day, you may begin to understand why epidemics of diarrhea and related diseases regularly sweep through infant-care centers...
...It turned out that the real question was whether the grocery store is the place where you get babies, and had that woman just purchased that one...
...sort that can be answered with "Because, because, because...
...To serve three-year-olds well, teachers somehow have to make time to answer their questions even though the: have twenty or more active little ones t organize, feed, nap, and otherwise gf through the day...
...Toddlers learn through all their senses...
...The kind of repressive control that keeps them sitting down to meaningless tasks day after day is destructive to their self-esteem and their relationship with learning...
...From the argument I am making, you may assume I am simply against day care for children...
...The mother's child, dirty diapers hanging around her ankles, was screaming in'a playpen in the living room, attended only by the blaring television set...
...Not realizing that forming a line is devel-opmentally beyond the capacity of such young children, staff struggle for long periods to get their toddlers to line up for routine events...
...as of middle-class ettings privation only by advantaged...
...In many centers, even in the better ones, young, unskilled staff struggle with large groups of very young children...
...That makes seven hours and twenty minutes of the day spent just on physical care—if you're lucky and the infants stay conveniently on schedule...
...As the basis for licensing day-care centers, ratios allowing more children per staff mean more licensed child-care slots are available—more slots of poorer quality...
...Children are serious enough about their questions sometimes to fall into rages when they don't get the information they want...
...Unprepared for how different it is to care for a group of children than to care for their own, they are overwhelmed and give it up...
...Most are going to private homes where women are taking in a few children for pay...
...The state license is also our guarantee to middle-class families that safe and ad-jquate care is being provided...
...Usually, these women have decided to go into the business because they have children of their own and want to stay home...
...And so families frequently have to find three or even more different arrangements for their babies during the first year...
...So, if there's to be any stimulation at all for the child, the care-giver had better chat and play up a storm while she's feeding and changing...
...In 1988, more than half of those with infants less than a year old are in the labor force...
...When the real questions come, they are surprising and fascinating—they give us a window into an individual child's way of making sense of the world...
...Without this opportunity, children become apathetic or uncontrollable—and sometimes both by turns...
...But think about the care-giver's day: Four hours to feed the babies, two hours and forty minutes to change them...
...Children who do not have a successful experience at this stage, or who have the experience frustrated or perverted, stop participating in the learning process...
...Many of them don't make it through the first year...
...One common sign of staff inexperience is the Big Toddler Lineup...
...Politicians invoking the sanctity of the family and the right to parental choice oppose stricter controls over staff-child ratios...
...The municipal day-care system in Madison, Wisconsin, recently received a frantic request for help...
...Preschoolers, ages three and up, are the group that most day-care centers have been accustomed to serve...
...Line up...
...The straightforward answer produced a tantrum...
...And the availability of licensed care is the basis upon which we force welfare mothers to leave their children and enter the job market...
...Since feeding and diaper-changing are necessarily one-on-one activities, each infant is bound to be largely unattended during the five-plus hours that the other three babies are being attended to...
...But we don't have nearly as many regulated spaces for children as there are children who need them...
...A good preschool can be a wonderful place, bubbling with energy, joy, and high seriousness...
...Staff resort to forcing children into the same boring activity all at the same time to maintain control...
...Just a few short years ago, in the 1970s, a popular notion held that day care would destroy the American family and make little communists of our children...
...Staff turnover rates exceed 30 per cent a year, so most don't stay long enough to be trained...
Vol. 52 • November 1988 • No. 11
