Belief - Everyone puts their infants in daycare so it must be ok. 

Human beings have behaved horribly to one another since time immemorial, engaging in behaviours that were accepted as normal, not even questioned, until someone did question them and laws and attitudes changed. 

Once upon a time it was normal to send children up chimneys to clean them, it was normal to cane them in school, homosexuality was illegal and punishable by law, slavery was a legitimate trade, I could go on. The point is that ‘everyone doing something’ does not make it right. Day nursery for infants is a legitimised form of emotional neglect. Even with the most highly trained, highly motivated kindly staff, day nursery is not a structure that can meet the emotional needs of infants under 30 months old. It is therefore contributing to behaviour problems in childhood and mental health problems in later childhood, adolescence and adulthood. 

Human beings are masters of selective perception. We have to be, the narratives we create around our lives help us to find peace with our lot, they save us having to work too hard to make change, they help us to justify choices we make that adversely affect us and others, they support our sense of belonging and our survival. The normalisation of our choices is an effective strategy for helping us feel good about questionable behaviours. Known self destructive behaviours like smoking or vaping are so ubiquitous because they are normalised. At least the decision to engage in smoking or vaping is a conscious choice of people who are old enough and capable of making the decision for themselves. As irrational as it seems to those who don’t engage, those who do are mainly harming themselves and they are able to own that responsibility. 

The decision to put infants into day-nursery for their earliest care is a decision made on behalf of those who have no voice and cannot own the decision. The impacts of day-nursery can last a lifetime, and will last a lifetime if people never have therapy, if they believe their mental health symptoms have descended on them from nowhere due to bad luck or faulty genes or faulty wiring. I have noticed that the majority of clients I ask, don’t  know who cared for them in their first 30 months. They often assume it was a parent, but until they ask directly, they have never been told. 

The idea that day-nursery has not contributed to later mental health issues is supported by a collective idea that parents who do everything (have a career and children concurrently) are heroic logistical managers and models of a lifestyle to aspire to. There appear to be two simultaneous and somewhat conflicting beliefs about the hours infants spend in daycare. One is that they are receiving the best academic education that parents themselves could not provide and the other is that parenting (socialisation and nurturing) are deep frozen for those hours. Parents are clearly not parenting while their children are being cared for by others, but those parents believe they can do all the parenting they need to in the short hours their children are with them in the evenings and at weekends. An underlying sense of lack of time together remains though because there also appears to be a trend to extend the hours that parents spend with their children awake, by eating later in the evening as a family, children having a later bedtime and joining adult pursuits more, like taking evening walks or eating in restaurants long past an optimal child bedtime. Children who must be woken in the morning have not had enough sleep. 

One mum explained to me that she did not want her children looked after in their own home when she was working at home as, despite being in a different room on a different floor,  she was unable to switch off from them. She would find herself distracted by thinking about whether they were getting enough food or going down to sleep at the right time. Rather than mitigate the impact of parent absenteeism by allowing them to be in a familiar setting, much better the children were out of the house so she could focus on her work. 

Infants are impacted by the absence of their parents directly by the sense of insecurity disrupted attachment leads to, as well as their parents lack of opportunity to know and understand their children well. Parents are less familiar with their children’s needs and the behaviours they engage in to get those needs met. Adult narratives that support parental comfort are more common and less connected to the reality of what their children need.

Reduced familiarity leads to reduced ability to read children’s body language and behaviour and supports conclusions like, ‘my child loves it at nursery’ which need to be subject to questioning. There is no way to measure this alleged love and human beings are very skilled at ‘perceiving evidence’ to support their beliefs and wishes. Some parents choose a nursery without parent accessible webcam because they do not want to be distracted by checking up on their children - and risk seeing them upset? Cameras in every setting would serve two important purposes. First, society would have a real rather than imagined view of life inside a nursery and second, it would support nurseries to be the best they can be as most people do not want to be caught on camera being less than their best- we know that speed cameras have a positive effect on driver attitude to speed. Taking an ostrich approach to our children’s care should not be possible. 

Normalisation is a hugely successful way of misleading large numbers of people. Yes, we can wait until research shows us unequivocally that nursery care for infants under 30 months has detrimental effects - but we will wait forever. Some things are simply too complex with too many variables to be able to be the subject of positivist, objective, quantitative research. There are learned voices out there pertaining to the idea that day-nursery for infants is inappropriate and there are plenty who have learned of its inappropriateness by working in the early years sector - and leaving it. 

This is a 14 year old article but is as relevant today as it was then in that we are no further forward. Notice how simple it is to draw simple conclusions when research considers oversimplified research questions and measures to be valid. We can choose to berate those whose perspective we don’t like because it pokes holes in our narrative - but if we are at peace with our choices (and we are sure our children ‘love’ their nursery, based on nothing more than our own, possibly somewhat biased, observation) then should it really bother us that much what the other opinion might be?