There has been a recent surge of local advertising to promote child care courses and child care centres. These adverts portray an almost perfect paradise for children to grow up in, a better place than home with better people than parents to take care for them. Children will be able to socialise, implying that they will develop better than children reared in their own homes with their own parents. Had this been true, people of my generation, who did not go to play schools, must all be socially incompetent and asocial loners.
It amazes me how all this is done in the names of love and of promoting the family. Or is it not? Children have already been robbed of their parents and parents of their children, through the introduction of the kindergarten. Starting school at three years old is already a trauma for the child, who is too young to be separated from the parents. But we pulled through with it for years with no greater visible results neither for the kids, nor for the parents and the economy.
Separating children from their parents early in life has been proved to be traumatic for the child. Upon birth, the child and parents start developing relationship patterns. These patterns of behaviour primarily revolve around the child's need for survival and the parents' needs to provide care. Through these patterns, children learn to attach to their parents in specific ways. Some children, for example an abandoned child, develop attachment patterns with concern around abandonment; an over-indulging parent-child relationship helps the child develop attachment patterns with concern around independence and self-agency. The way the parents relate to the child at this phase is crucial in determining the child's quality of attachment patterns later on in life.
It is obvious, therefore, that the earlier the child is disengaged from the parent-child relationship, the more likely it is that the child suffers psychological consequences. We know that the first few years of life are the formative years. The more the parents spend time with the child, the more they come to know the child's temperament, character, and so on, and the more likely they are to influence the child. If children are taken earlier away from their parents and for longer periods of time, the parents will never come to know them as they should. And neither will the children come to know and respect the parents as they should.
The repercussions of this will eventually emerge later on in life, particularly during adolescence. How can parents influence their teens then? How can they be in control? What kind of relationship will they develop in these critical years? Many parents are already increasingly finding themselves oblivious to the best ways with which to relate to their children.
Have authorities researched the long-term repercussions of childcare centres? Have they researched their value? Do they know exactly the implications involved? Are they doing things blindly? They can at least look at what is happening elsewhere in Europe and in the world. We might want to think that shifting childcare responsibilities from parents to child carers is progress. But is it really beneficial to the child, to the parents, and to society? Or is this just the unfounded idea of a leading minority they want to impose on the rest?
Foreign researchers have found few benefits of childcare for the children and most of them are economical and material. Most of these findings are also related to a failed economy which pushed both parents out to work in order to survive. Since its inception, childcare has, by its very distancing between parent and child, yielded quite some negative effects. Look at other countries like Italy, Germany and the UK. They are facing increasing mental disorders, particularly those types in which attachment is implicated, for example personality disorders. Increasingly, young people are becoming intolerant to waiting, suffering and sacrifices and instant gratification, which is implicated in the addictions, is becoming a norm. I have written earlier about fatherlessness and encouraged fathers to participate in the upbringing of their children. We know there is a problem in this respect and serious measures need to be taken to involve fathers in family life. Now childcare will also rob the children of their mothers' care and attention.
In my view, child care should only be an adjunct to parental care rather than a replacement. The real investment should be in the family and in developing policies that permit parents to parent the children themselves rather than in creating so-called educational systems that steal the role of parenting from the parents. We all know that during their first years, children benefit from their parents more than they can benefit from anyone else. Why encourage and subsidise mothers and fathers to go out and work instead of subsidising parents to bear and rear their own children?
For all the talk about providing flexi-time opportunities, job-sharing opportunities and the like, mothers are still finding it immensely difficult to manage juggling family life and early mothering with maintaining a job because of financial necessity. Many mothers feel torn between having to go back to work and leaving their baby behind. Perhaps a better exercise would have been finding ways and means of helping alleviate financial burdens on new parents, supporting them during the very first years and easing the way to a better structured family life with the family unit as its focus. If the family is not going to be supported, all that surrounds it will collapse. It's basic common sense!
• Mr Azzopardi is a systemic family psychotherapist.
It amazes me how all this is done in the names of love and of promoting the family. Or is it not? Children have already been robbed of their parents and parents of their children, through the introduction of the kindergarten. Starting school at three years old is already a trauma for the child, who is too young to be separated from the parents. But we pulled through with it for years with no greater visible results neither for the kids, nor for the parents and the economy.
Separating children from their parents early in life has been proved to be traumatic for the child. Upon birth, the child and parents start developing relationship patterns. These patterns of behaviour primarily revolve around the child's need for survival and the parents' needs to provide care. Through these patterns, children learn to attach to their parents in specific ways. Some children, for example an abandoned child, develop attachment patterns with concern around abandonment; an over-indulging parent-child relationship helps the child develop attachment patterns with concern around independence and self-agency. The way the parents relate to the child at this phase is crucial in determining the child's quality of attachment patterns later on in life.
It is obvious, therefore, that the earlier the child is disengaged from the parent-child relationship, the more likely it is that the child suffers psychological consequences. We know that the first few years of life are the formative years. The more the parents spend time with the child, the more they come to know the child's temperament, character, and so on, and the more likely they are to influence the child. If children are taken earlier away from their parents and for longer periods of time, the parents will never come to know them as they should. And neither will the children come to know and respect the parents as they should.
The repercussions of this will eventually emerge later on in life, particularly during adolescence. How can parents influence their teens then? How can they be in control? What kind of relationship will they develop in these critical years? Many parents are already increasingly finding themselves oblivious to the best ways with which to relate to their children.
Have authorities researched the long-term repercussions of childcare centres? Have they researched their value? Do they know exactly the implications involved? Are they doing things blindly? They can at least look at what is happening elsewhere in Europe and in the world. We might want to think that shifting childcare responsibilities from parents to child carers is progress. But is it really beneficial to the child, to the parents, and to society? Or is this just the unfounded idea of a leading minority they want to impose on the rest?
Foreign researchers have found few benefits of childcare for the children and most of them are economical and material. Most of these findings are also related to a failed economy which pushed both parents out to work in order to survive. Since its inception, childcare has, by its very distancing between parent and child, yielded quite some negative effects. Look at other countries like Italy, Germany and the UK. They are facing increasing mental disorders, particularly those types in which attachment is implicated, for example personality disorders. Increasingly, young people are becoming intolerant to waiting, suffering and sacrifices and instant gratification, which is implicated in the addictions, is becoming a norm. I have written earlier about fatherlessness and encouraged fathers to participate in the upbringing of their children. We know there is a problem in this respect and serious measures need to be taken to involve fathers in family life. Now childcare will also rob the children of their mothers' care and attention.
In my view, child care should only be an adjunct to parental care rather than a replacement. The real investment should be in the family and in developing policies that permit parents to parent the children themselves rather than in creating so-called educational systems that steal the role of parenting from the parents. We all know that during their first years, children benefit from their parents more than they can benefit from anyone else. Why encourage and subsidise mothers and fathers to go out and work instead of subsidising parents to bear and rear their own children?
For all the talk about providing flexi-time opportunities, job-sharing opportunities and the like, mothers are still finding it immensely difficult to manage juggling family life and early mothering with maintaining a job because of financial necessity. Many mothers feel torn between having to go back to work and leaving their baby behind. Perhaps a better exercise would have been finding ways and means of helping alleviate financial burdens on new parents, supporting them during the very first years and easing the way to a better structured family life with the family unit as its focus. If the family is not going to be supported, all that surrounds it will collapse. It's basic common sense!
• Mr Azzopardi is a systemic family psychotherapist.