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
insulated love affair between children and parents found in modern societies
does not usually exist in traditional societies. For example, in some tribal
societies, such as the Ngoni, the father and mother of a child did not rear
their infant alone—far from it. Secondly, common sense tells US that day care
would not be so widespread today if parents care-takers found children had
problems with it. 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 neural or 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. 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. Whatever the long-term effects,
parents sometimes find the immediate effects difficult to deal with. Children
under three are likely to protest at leaving their parents and show unhappiness.
At the age of three or three and a half almost all children find the transition
to nursery easy, and this is undoubtedly why more and more parents make use of
child care at this time. The matter, then, is far from clear-cut, though
experience and available evidence indicate that early care is reasonable for
infants.
单选题
Which of the following statements would Bowlby support?
A. Statistical studies should be carried out to assess the positive effect
of day care for children at the age of three or older.
B. Early day care can delay the occurrence of mental illness in
children.
C. The first three years of one's life is extremely important to the later
development of personality.
D. Children under three get used to the life at nursery schools more readily
than children over three.