VICTORIA WHITE: Our children don’t need corporate creches — all they need is love

BABIES shouldn’t go to creches.Nor should toddlers. Three-year-olds shouldn’t go to creche full-time. It’s as simple as that.

I am shaking with rage at the cruelty inflicted on the precious children in Giraffe, Belarmine, Links, Malahide and Little Harvard, Rathnew in Tuesday’s Prime Time on RTÉ. My heart goes out to the parents who trusted these creches with their beloved children.

But I disagree that creches can be sorted by more inspection, more qualifications or even more funding. Nine years ago in the UK the BBC did a similar undercover investigation of creches which also showed children being mistreated. It is clear that the lack of a strong emotional bond between individual carers and individual children in corporate creches creates an environment favourable to child welfare abuses.

And even in creches where this is not the case, the lack of a one-to-one relationship between carer and child militates against optimal child development. In the UK, a Department of Education study in 1999 found children in a nursery getting one-to-one attention, on average, for eight minutes a day.

Very small children’s brains develop primarily through interaction with one very special person. Regulation child to staff ratios in creches are insane — one adult for three babies under one year, one adult for five toddlers under two and a half and one adult for a whopping 10 older kids. And Prime Time reported breaches of the ratios in nearly half of creches inspected.

When opting for a creche, the parent is encouraged to buy a brand, not a special person. You don’t go on word of mouth as you would if you were leaving your kids with a local childminder. You don’t go on gut instinct, as I did when I hired the childminder who looked after my son Jack when he was a baby and goes to rock concerts with him 14 years later.

No, you buy corporate professionalism. You think that means training, safety, oversight and of course we now know that sometimes you are horribly wrong. But were you not looking for the wrong things in the first place? All your baby needs is love.

This is where the idiocy of a name like “Little Harvard” comes in. Babies and very young children don’t need education, they need loving care. However, unlike love, education can be measured and traded and this is why creches promote it to parents anxious to give their children every advantage in a competitive economy.

What, you’re saying? Don’t you know the importance of “early childhood education”? Minister Frances Fitzgerald herself has described early childhood education in the Dáil as “crucial to a child’s emotional, cognitive and social development” and cited returns to the economy of three to 10 times the investment made.

And it’s not true. It is true is that preschool education has been shown to significantly benefit children from disadvantaged backgrounds. But as the National Economic and Social Forum’s Early Childhood and Education said in 2005, the benefits of preschool to more advantaged children are “modest, if any.”

The Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) study in the UK found that kids made more “school ready” by preschool quickly lose their advantage over the kids who didn’t go to preschool once big school starts.

Disadvantaged kids will not benefit from preschool if their preschools are ghettos of disadvantage and this is what makes universal preschool a worth a shot if it helps “level the playing field”.

However, preschool is for three and four-year-olds and it lasts three or four hours. It is not for babies. It is not for one-year-olds. It is not for two-year-olds. It should not last all day.

The most comprehensive international research makes negative findings for extensive group care before a child is three years old. In the US, the National Institute of Child Health and Development study showed young children who had over 30 hours of institutional care every week were three times more likely to have behaviour problems as those who had group care for less than 10 hours a week.

In the UK, the EPPE study found that high levels of group care before the age of three were associated with higher levels of anti-social behaviour at three years.

Child psychologist Penelope Leach led the Families, Children and Child Care research study in the UK which found nursery-cared babies and toddlers to have higher levels of aggression than children in one-to-one care and to be “inclined to become withdrawn, compliant and sad”.

She told the Guardian in 2005: “It is fairly clear from data from different parts of the world that the less time children spend in group care before three years, the better.” Her study found care at home with a parent best for young children, followed by care by nannies and childminders and then the extended family.

The broad strokes of these research findings have been repeated in studies in countries as different as Australia and Norway, and in a UK Government audit of international research. So you’d think we’d hear about them, wouldn’t you? You’d think our Government and health authorities would trust us with the knowledge that babies and toddlers do best with mam or dad or gran or a childminder and should not go to an institutional creche full-time.

But this information doesn’t suit them. Institutional, group care is the easiest form of care to manage and control. It generates the most tax income both on its own income and the income of the parents thus “freed” to be in the workplace full time.

I think there’s more to it than that, however, and this is the part which creeps me out. I think our mindless support of corporate creches betrays a desire to remove the mother figure from the picture.

I first became open to this idea when I read Penelope Leach’s 1995 manifesto for children, Children First. She suggests that parents flee the mother figure because they don’t want to be reminded that they are not there to mother themselves. The minder or family member represents competition and makes us guilty.

I would go further. I think the sticky, obsessive, love of a mother figure — an actual mother or a childminder — stirs up feelings with which we can’t deal. Feelings of loss from our own childhoods? The desire to escape from our own mothers or the lives they led? I’m not sure.

I really am not saying that mothers should stay home if they don’t want to. These are decisions which parents should make for themselves. Deputising to a minder or family member if you both go out to work is a good idea. But deputising the full-time care of the under-threes to a corporate creche is not.

In the words of the famous child psychologist, Steve Biddulph in his book, Raising Babies, I hope that “along with all the other nightmares of our child rearing history — gin in the baby’s bottle, child labour in the coal mines, boarding school for six-year-olds — it will be consigned to the dustbin of history.”

*Victoria White’s book Mother Ireland: why Ireland hates motherhood is available from www.londubh.ie