| It has been argued that an infant under
three who is cared for outside the home may suffer because of the separation
from his parents. The British psychoanalyst John Bowlby maintains that
separation from the parents during the sensitive "attachment" period from birth
to three may scar a child's personality and predispose to emotional problems in
later life. Some people have drawn the conclusion from Bowlby's work that
children should not be subjected to day care before the age of three because of
the parental separation it entails, and many people do believe this. But there
are also arguments against such a strong conclusion. Firstly anthropologists point out that the secluded love affair between children and parents found in modern societies does not usually exist in traditional societies. For example, we saw earlier that among the Ngoni the father and mother of a child did not rear their infant alone--far from it. But traditional societies are so different from modern societies that comparisons based on just one factor are hard to interpret. Secondly, common sense tells us that day care would not be so widespread today if parents, caretakers or pediatricians found that children had problems with it. But Bowlby's analysis raises the possibility that early day care has delayed effects. The possibility that such care might lead to, say, more mental illness or crime 15 or 20 years later can only be explored by the use of statistics. Statistical studies of this kind have not yet been carried out, and even if they were, the results would be certain to be complicated and controversial. Thirdly, in the last decade, there have been a number of careful American studies of children in day care, and they have uniformly reported that day care had a neutral of slightly positive effect on children's development. But tests that have had to be used to measure this development are not widely enough accepted to settle the issue. |