Day Care History | What Wize Women Want™

Day Care

The proponents of the child day care concept, explored for 200 years, attempt to bring together respect for children, recognition of early childhood education and social concern to meet changing cultural patterns. In the eighteenth century, industries in England provided facilities for the children of workers. In Germany in 1802, France in 1844 and Italy and Japan, governments and industries began to fund services. During the Civil War, the US government for a short time provided money to support a few centers for children of war heroes. The NY Nursery and Philadelphia Day Nursery opened facilities for working mothers.

In the 1890’s, day nurseries abounded under philanthropic auspices in an attempt to get children out of residential institutions. Children were abandoned to these facilities for housing children (orphanages) because there were no mothers’ pensions or other forms of relief for single mothers who lost husbands to war. Single mothers overwhelmed with having to work and care for numerous children, abandoned them to residential facilities until, if ever, they could afford to keep them at home.

At the turn of the century, child study and research began to flourish. By 1928, universities established laboratories for preschool children. Day Care environments became sterile environments for analysis and examination. Children became objects of research. Procedures in nursery centers began to ‘improve’ and in 1933 the US government began to appropriate funds for nursery centers through the Federal Relief Administration. With the onset of World War II, women were drawn into industry in great numbers and the day care centers expanded to accommodate more children. At the close of the war, Federal funds for day care were withdrawn.

In 1958, The National Committee for the Day Care of Children was formed to secure funding. The first study on Day Care was released and recommended the resumption of public funding. Billions of Federal dollars were funneled into programs including Head Start (for poor young children) and Follow Through (for older children).

The numerous needs of day cares escalated to include: 1) centers of sufficient quality, quantity and distribution; 2) accessible pre-service and in-service for training professionals; 3) equitable salaries; 4) ancillary services; 5) sick bays for children; 6) arrangements for sick parents and transport; 7) night care; 8) short care needs; 9) greater continuity among programs; 10) AND funding, funding, funding as Day Care is an expensive undertaking. Institutional care became a complicated industry.

Day Care today is considered politically a desperate need. However, until one remarkable study performed by Dr. James Prescott of the National Institute of Health, the research was inconclusive regarding the positive impact of day care to home care. According to the research, children with no previous nursery experience tend to catch up with children from such programs by third grade. There is little information on the impact of these programs with respect to socioeconomic variables, education, health, race, etc. One pertinent study by Gornicki in 1962 where children reared in their own homes in which the above variables were controlled, reinforces empirical judgement that home care is desirable especially in the first two years of life to day care.

A powerful research study conducted over 20 years at the National Institute of Health on care of young children systematically refutes the positive influences of day care for children. The original intent of the study was to determine the root causes of violence among the young; predetermined or learned. Dr. Prescott’s, former NIH administrator, in a documentary entitled “Rock-A-Bye-Baby” produced by Time Life describes the influence of different practices in infant treatment and child rearing on emotional development, both in humans and monkeys. The film is an accumulation of the twenty-year study to inform the general public on natural, wholesome methods for redesigning healthy child rearing practices.

Dr. Prescott describes that the contact of the child to the mother represents the first socio-emotional interaction the child experiences and lays the fundamentals for its later behaviors. The social animals isolated from their mothers and receiving no nurturing or physical affection develop severe depression and can die from such deprivation. In addition, mother-infant isolation that leads to sensory deprivation can cause developmental brain damage. These facts show that mother love has a neurological and biological basis that is essential to life.

Dr. Harry Harlow’s experiments with surrogate mothers which have shown that monkeys raised alone in an environment without mother and peers prefer to be with a cloth-covered mother surrogate without milk bottle rather than with a wire-care surrogate mother that provides a milk bottle, even when hungry. They cling to their cloth-covered wooden dolls when they are frightened and they experience the same emotional stress other social animal’s experience when isolated from their surrogate mothers. These experiments show that the need for a loving relationship is stronger than the mere need for food even when hungry. Love-hunger is stronger than food-hunger.

The single greatest contribution to understanding Drs. William Mason and Gershol Berkson provided the mother-infant separation syndrome in their swinging mother surrogate experiments where the importance of body movement in mother-infant bonding was documented. Monkeys raised singly in cages with stationary cloth mother surrogates were compared to those raised with swinging cloth mother surrogates. The infant monkeys reared on the stationary mother surrogate developed all of the abnormalities which isolation-reared monkeys develop- depression, social withdrawal, aversion to touch, stereotypical rocking and chronic toe and penis anti-social behavior. The infant monkeys reared on swinging surrogate mother developed normally with only minor stimulus-seeking behaviors. Depression, social withdrawal and avoidance of touch were absent in the swinging mother surrogate mother reared infants. Children who are carried daily develop into healthier human beings.

There are good reasons why infants and children seek to be carried on the body of their mothers and fathers and love to be rocked to sleep. Dr. Prescott’s experiments examined the neurological and biological mechanisms involved in the process. Brain-behavioral studies on the effects of loss of mother love on the structural and functional development of the brain were conducted. These studies documented both the structural abnormalities of brain cells and functional abnormalities.

Studies by Dr. Selma Fraiberg on congenitally blind children demonstrated that when these blind children received sufficient body contact and movement stimulation from their parents, they develop normal social-emotional behaviors. These effects are dramatically portrayed in the documentary, as are the studies of Dr. Mary Neal who constructed a swinging bassinet for premature babies. The premature babies that were given this artificial body movement stimulation showed accelerated neurological maturation, as reflected in head movements, crawling, grasping and other reflexes. These infants gained weight faster, have less health problems, and were discharged earlier from the hospital than non-moved premature infants.

The documentary also demonstrates how a retarded institutionalized infant of six months of age can have retardation reversed when provided a loving substitute mother in an intense ‘one-to-one’ relationship. The longer the deprivation and the later the mother substitute is provided such infants, the less recovery from the damage is possible.

Dr. Prescott’s work now entitled “Somato-Sensory Affectional Deprivation Syndrome” demonstrates the importance of the sensory system in understanding the brain structures, processes and learning mechanisms involved in mother-infant social interaction. The sensory, neurological, and physical processes that mediate the brain behaviors resulting from the loss of mother love is critical to regulating the motor system of healthy children.

Since medieval and ancient times, it has been known that deprivation of sensory stimuli like the mothers’ voice and vision in early time of human life will cause irreversible mental retardation in the child. Also, research reiterates that prevention of child play, devoid of rules and standards, will cause intellectual deficits in the adult. But eyes, ears and the nose are not the only human sensory systems.

Additionally, there are the two body sensor systems, the ‘somatosensors’. One is the sensor for maintaining orientation and upright walk. The other one is the skin, for sensing touch. These neglected senses are of overwhelming importance for the development of social abilities for adult life. Dr. Prescott found that its deprivation in childhood is a major cause for adult and teen violence.

Much of the work at Stanford University by Carl Pribrim today on the holographic brain specifically reflects that children who are deprived of love and affection in the early years, develop a split brain phenomena. That is, the primal brain activates flight and fright and the forebrain, the seat of intelligence, shuts down to a protective modality. Learning and fear do not exist in the same domain. If a child has emotional scarring from lack of a ‘safe’ environment, the child will not and cannot retain information and build neurons of the brain conducive to learning in the ‘fright’ modality.

In the late 1980’s, Swedish Pediatrics Associates became consumed with Dr. Prescott’s findings. Convincing legislators in that country of its significance, laws were mandated that mothers would be salaried to stay home and raise their children for the first year of the child’s life. Within a few years, studies conducted by the Pediatrics Associates concluded that the government was saving thousands of dollars with such a move, crime had diminished, as well as violence. The government then decided to extend the period to three years for a mother to stay home. The sayings to the government with this move were estimated to be $471,000 per youth offender ages 9-12. When American incarcerated youths are set in the equation, taxpayers pay $25,000- $28,000 per year per inmate. If only HALF of the inmates are deterred from this move, the savings in taxes would be staggering.

The following year, Sweden extended the law to fathers as well. Neighboring countries- Holland, Denmark and others- witnessing the effects of this legislation formulated laws that enabled mothers to stay home with their children for the first one to three years of life.

Carl Sagan, physicist and Director of Laboratory for Planetary Studies, in the last chapter in his book Cosmos, hailed Dr. Prescott as one of the “only living scientist whose work speaks for the earth”. Dr. Prescott’s theory of sensory deprivation of physical affection during the formative years of brain development- failure to develop affectional bonds- is the major cause of alienation, violence and substance abuse in our culture. His studies of pathologically violent juveniles and adults propose that the cerebellum, the brain, is the master integrating and regulatory system of sensory, emotional and motor processes. The study of 49 primitive countries correctly predicted violence due to this lack of sensory development.

In 1990, the World Health Organization and UNICEF recommended breast-feeding for ‘two years and beyond’ (Innocenti Declaration). For at least one full year, the American Academy of Pediatrics in a revised policy statement “Breast-feeding and the Use of Human Milk” (Pediatrics, December 1997) advises mothers to do the same. This action was initiated due to mounting evidence that indicated that traditional ‘institutionalized day care” which involves “stranger care” not only separates infants and very young children from their mothers and their nurturing love and affection, but also places them at ‘high-risk’ for abnormal brain-behavioral development. “Day Care” also impairs or prevents breast-feeding which is essential for normal immunological health and brain development. Breast-feeding is intimately linked to the child-care reform agenda. Yet, many newborns and infants are deprived of this best ‘head start’ because our socio-economic based child-care system discourages- if not prevents- women from being ‘nurturing mothers’ and from breast-feeding their infants for the time periods recommended by the WHO, UNISEF and the American Academy of Pediatrics. This dilemma is also recognized in breast cancer research that postulates that the inability for the mammalian glands to function normally in birthing mothers may clog and form growths leading to future breast cancer.

Of special interest is the loss of amino acid- tryptophan- necessary for brain serotonin development and other essential brain nutrients found only in breastmilk and absent in formula milk which pose special risks for abnormal brain development in formula fed infants. Deficiencies in brain serotonin have been well established in depressive, impulse dyscontrol and violent behaviors. The report that some 600,000 children and youth have been prescribed serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) to control depression is indicative of the magnitude of the problem. Prozac prescriptions alone have increased 46% from last year for those 13-18 years of age. It is highly unlikely that any of these children have been breast-fed for two years or beyond. Prevention is easy if only we had the courage and wisdom to act on the common sense and hard science before us.

In January 1988 edition of Pediatrics, Dr. Horwood and Fergusson from the Christchurch School of Medicine, New Zealand noted:

“Breast-feeding is associated with small but detectable increases in cognitive ability and educational achievement. These effects are 1) Pervasive being reflected in a range of measures including standardized tests, teacher ratings and academic outcomes in high school; and 2) relatively long-lived, extending throughout childhood into young adulthood.

Consideration for the basic human needs of our children must be first and foremost for the 21^st century. Obviously, it is our opinion that children in home care are far superior in intelligence, social skills and behavioral patterning than their day care counterparts. Additional research is found in the chapters that follow. In light of the statistics, research and opinions of professionals, it would behoove legislators to follow the examples of other countries and consider reimbursing mother’s to stay home with children for the first three years of life redirecting the funding spent on day care and its complex problems, building prisons, overworking judicial staff, overcrowding jails and housing juvenile delinquents. Rethinking the metal model of child rearing is economical and categorically diminishes the rate of crime and antisocial youth behaviors.

Day Care

The proponents of the child day care concept, explored for 200 years, attempt to bring together respect for children, recognition of early childhood education and social concern to meet changing cultural patterns. In the eighteenth century, industries in England provided facilities for the children of workers. In Germany in 1802, France in 1844, Italy, and Japan, governments and industries began to fund services. During the Civil War, the US government for a short time provided money to support a few centers for children of war heroes. The NY Nursery and Philadelphia Day Nursery opened facilities for working mothers (Pulliam 1999).

Out of the Rubble of War

In 1991, Newsweek captured the attention of reader’s world wide with its compelling story: The Best Schools in the World. (Hinckle 1991). Among those listed were the Infant/Toddler Centers and Preschools of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia, Italy. After the World War II, there were casualties gone unnoticed by the media and press. Community and family ostracized hundreds of young girls impregnated by infiltrating soldiers in Italy. Literally out of the rubble of the war, these pregnant women built a community that has stood the test of time, struggle and personal pain. The greatest day care system in the world is housed in the Reggio Emilia Day Cares of Italy (Malaguzzi 1992).

Over twenty-five years old, the Reggio schools guide children from two to six in supporting environments that produce work, art and products through a thematic approach unknown by children so young. These women have originated the most remarkable system of education based in care, small group learning, parental involvement and hands-on activities. (Rinaldi 1992, Gandini 1993). The Hundred Languages of Children tours the United States displaying the years of accumulated work of these children and their teachers. Unfortunately, current day care legislation prohibits this astounding system of educating young children to ever be incorporated in America. (Gandini 1993)

Great care has been taken to maximize every component of education-enriched environment, respect for the development of the ‘whole’ child, constructivist teaching, an experimental approach, documentation, well trained staff, attention to ‘hands on instruction’ and strong parental involvement. Reggio’s approach is grounded in the belief in the ‘image of the child’. The child is born with potential, is competent, wants to know, is full of resources, is powerful and is a researcher for knowledge and understanding. The child is a ‘producer’ rather than a ‘consumer’. They further explain that ‘knowledge does not come from the outside but is constructed’. The child is viewed as competent, interested and curious in constructing their learning (Gandini 1993).

Among the basic principles of the Reggio approach, these are outstanding (Malaguzzi 1996):

View the children as individuals, and as individuals in relationship with other children, family members and teachers. These relationships are interconnected, reciprocal and actively supported.
To understand that children learn in connection with their well being and the well being of their parents and teachers; to understand that it is the ‘right’ of children to receive high quality care and education.
To view parents’ participation as essential and to understand that parent participation can take many forms; day to day interaction during work; discussions of educational and psychological issues; special events and trips and celebrations; to understand that parents are an active part of their children’s learning experience and at the same time, help ensure the welfare of all children.
To develop a school that is amicable; to understand that the physical space is planned to encourage encounters, communication and relationships; to include arrangement of structures, objects and activities that encourage choices, problem solving and discoveries in the process of learning.
To remember that time is not set by the clock but by the children’s own sense pf time and their personal proclivities because children stay with the same teachers and the same peer groups for three years.
To teach as partners with other teachers; to observe children closely; to use understanding to act as resources to children; to ask questions; to discover the children’s ideas, hypotheses and theories; to provide occasions for discovery and learning; to enjoy discovery with the children.
To cooperate at levels in the school as the mode of working that makes achievement of complex goals possible; to work as pairs of each classroom not as teacher and assistant but at the same level; to maintain a strong collegial relationship with all other teachers and staff and engage in continuous discussion and interpretation of the work of and with children; to promote ongoing training and theoretical enrichment to research; prepare documentation of the world of children.
To understand that the curriculum is not established in advance; to understand that teachers express general goals and make hypotheses about what direction the activities and projects might take; to make appropriate preparations; to adjust curriculum accordingly as ideas emerge in the process of each activity or project.
To support interdependence of cooperation and organization in a careful and precise manner by providing a careful, well-developed structure; to cooperate in the details of each teacher’s schedule, planning meetings with families, children’s diet, etc. in order to offer the best experience possible for children.
To facilitate children’s exploration and themes and work on short and long term projects; to encourage project ideas that originate in the continuum of experiences of children and teachers in constructing knowledge together; to understand that projects may start either from a chance event, an idea or a problem proposed by one or more children or because of an experience initiated directly by teachers.
To understand the role of the artelierista as a teacher trained in the visual arts who works closely with other teachers and children in every pre-primary school; to provide the artelierista a space called an atelier used by all children and teachers, containing a variety of tools and resource materials, along with records of past projects and experiences; to understand that the children’s products are not referred to as art- but languages or modes of expression.
To provide transcriptions of children’s remarks, discussions, photographs and representations as documents of their work.