Dear Editor:
Unlike Mayor Linton, I am not excited about the spaces opening up in Rockwood’s daycare where more of our precious children, especially infants, will be leaving their mother and having to adjust to new caregivers, possibly several over the next three years.
The book entitled, You Can’t Say That in Canada by Margaret Wente highlights this issue as she believes it has generated “more nonsense and hysteria” than any other subject she has written about. For years the daycare lobby has clamored for heavily subsidized universal daycare. It now appears they have succeeded.
Wealthy and poor families pay the same fees, while the taxpayers pay “billions” of dollars. She alleges that the middle and upper income families benefit the most. The poor tended (2009, Quebec) not to use the program.
A noted pediatrician, Dr Chicoine, in 2004 wrote that too many parents put their children into daycare at too young an age. “Babies need affection and a form of security within the family.” “It is the basis for intelligence, their future behavior, and a lot of other things.”
Children may be permanently impaired and lack trust if they can not bond with parents. The first two years of development are the most important for the child. Dr. Chiconine estimates that one in four may be lost and that feminists have done a disservice to women being forced to go back to work early.
My training and work as a social worker and observations of my daughter’s experience in the daycare field seems to substantiate Dr. Chicoine’s claims. Young children can get bounced from worker to worker, daycare to daycare without the bonding needed to trust or develop intimate relationships with adults.
The pay is not high for daycare workers. They may move from job to job seeking greater pay. This requires them to adjust to new children, working conditions and other parents. When families are poor and without much money, the daycare worker may be asked to wait until the parent’s payday before they get paid, as experienced by our daughter.
I allege that our governments have had a vested interest in getting everyone working, the tax dollars to roll in, and the economy to boom.
But look at how many young people may fall through the cracks with drugs, alcohol, mental illness, suicide, and murders as has happened in U.S. schools.
The early years matter. Daycare is not all that it is cracked up to be.
Pat Woode,
Fergus