Babies don’t need mum at home for a year. They need her for three

WE are meant to be entering a new era by preparing Ireland’s first Early Years Strategy, but we’re telling ourselves porkies writes Victoria White

The biggest one is that children do best with a parent at home for the first year.

Parents don’t need a year at home. They need at least two, and probably three, years. That’s what the “international evidence” the Government is quoting says. (UNESCO says one year is the minimum). But the garbled version of this “evidence” with which we are being presented doesn’t just tell us that one year off is great — it tells us it’s all you need. When you’ve done a year, your child can waddle into a crèche and you can work all the hours God sends.

The experts in the UNESCO report that the Government quotes say something completely different.

British childcare guru, Penelope Leach, who was the director of the exhaustive Families, Children and Childcare research project, in the UK, says: “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.

"Infants spending as little as 12 hours a week in day nurseries showed slightly lower levels of social development and emotional regulation…Somewhere after two years, as the children begin to relate more to each other than to the adult, then high-quality, group-based care became an unequivocal benefit.”

The UNESCO report also quotes the huge US research project, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, as saying: “The more time children spent in childcare from birth to age four and a half, the more adults tended to rate them… as less likely to get along with others, as more assertive, as disobedient and as aggressive.”

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‘Right from the Start’, the report to Government from the Expert Advisory Group on the Early Years Strategy, doesn’t headline either of these research projects.

And while it cites the UK’s foremost childcare expert, Edward Melhuish, on the benefits of pre-school education, it doesn’t delve into the audit of research into childcare which he carried out for the UK Government in 2004. The audit found that long hours of group care carried risks for children under two years.

While ‘Right from the Start’ cites our own National Economic and Social Forum’s ‘Early Childhood Care and Education’ (2005) report on early-years education, again it omits the NESF’s finding that if a mother works outside the home full-time before a child is 18 months old, it has “adverse effects on child cognitive development.”

I was back at work full-time when my eldest child was four months old and — having been refused parental leave — when my twins were eight months old. I do not have any agenda to make mothers, or fathers, feel guilty. But I want my children to have better options than I did, when they are parents, and there’s no hope that will ever happen if we can’t face facts.

READ MORE: Reform could double parental leave .

I would welcome the year’s paid leave Minister for Children, James Reilly, has suggested as a long-term Government aim. I would welcome the long overdue two weeks’ paid paternity leave suggested with it. But it would be very sad if we ventured into what is meant to be a brave new world of taking childhood seriously, but without giving children what they need.

We should give either parent the chance to stay at home for a child’s first three years, as was suggested by the Commission on the Family (1998) and supported by the Labour Party in 2002. The right to stay at home for your child’s first three years is common across the EU, including in Germany, Spain and Poland, while several other countries, including Austria and Slovakia and Finland, provide three years’ paid leave. Finland has the best educational outcomes in the world.

Our rate of child benefit is very high and is, in effect, a childcare payment, though it is never included when we fail in those international calculations of GDP spent on childcare.

But how much you get depends on how many children you have, while the Finnish payment recognises that the income forgone by the parent in the home is the same if you have one child as if you have four.

You never hear about Finnish parents in the home, but you hear endlessly about Finnish preschools, as part of the wholly inaccurate and unscientific pumping of the benefits of early-years education.

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When calculating the worth of investing in pre-school education, ‘Right from the Start’ has single dollars multiplying as many as 16 times.

What no-one mentions is that the research cited refers to programmes for seriously disadvantaged American children. It does not translate for Ireland. Our own NESF report describes the benefits of pre-school education for relatively advantaged children as “modest, if any.”

Pre-school benefits everyone most if it is inclusive, of course, and few would argue against a second pre-school year, if school starts when a child is five years old. There are many proposals in ‘Right from the Start’ that are very welcome, such as the drawing up of a National Parenting Action Plan.

But it’s worrying that there is so much sifting of the evidence when the Government talks about the care of young children. And what’s more worrying is the probable reason this happens. It’s because the stakes are so high.

READ MORE: ‘Parental leave plans will only work if radical childcare reforms included’ .

As UNESCO’s report says, governments want women in the workforce because they want to boost their GDP and their tax take. That’s understandable, because these are the only measures by which they — and their electorates — know how to judge their success.

But it’s a short-cut to pretend that toddlers of two are better off in group care than at home with a parent.

And it’s not even a short-cut that necessarily gets you to prosperity any faster, as the Finns, who have the lowest child poverty in the world, can testify. And that’s before we even begin to question how true prosperity can ever mean two parents working full-time in their toddler’s second year, because they need two salaries just to keep a roof over their heads.

A truly “radical reorientation of structures, organisations, resources and policy priorities”, as promised by the Government’s early-years strategy, wouldn’t stop at a year’s paid parental leave or even a good pre-school service. It would value parents who have children under three as technicians who are working on the brains of the future and pay them for the work they do.

We should give either parent the chance to stay at home for a child’s first three years

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