Belief: Its quality of time not quantity that is important. We can compensate by…holidays, house, activities.
Quality of time spent together with children is important of course, but so is quantity. Infants need love. They require loving responsive attention to their needs in the moment. Infants need to feel safe and secure. After the period of infancy where they want to be in physical contact for much of the time, there follows a period where they increasingly have confidence to move away physically, but proximity continues to be vital to emotional safety. The mum who believes her baby is occupied fully with toys and other distractions, only checking back occasionally to look at her, is losing interest in her mum, is misreading the signals. The infant is checking that mum is still there. Reassured, the infant can go on exploring with confidence that mum will be there if needed. At some point the infant will want a cuddle or food or a nappy change or soothing to sleep, at that point the infant may cry to indicate there is a need and will seek out mum to satisfy the need.
In the nursery situation, mum is not there in the moment. Fear sets in, distress ensues and sense of safety is compromised. Trained staff can offer some attention. The attention they can offer is compromised though by their responsibility for multiple children who may need attention all at the same time, by not knowing the child so intimately and not having the deep love and inate investment in the child that the mother has. Therefore it takes longer to identify the need, and staff are tied to scheduling constraints of the nursery day. Eating, sleeping, playing are all activities that happen according to a timetable which is convenient for adults. If an infant's internal timetable does not match the nursery timetable, there is a risk the need, if ostensibly satisfied, may not be satisfied in full. Stress is exhausting though, so most infants will eventually conform to sleeping on time as humans can only fight sleep for so long.
Babies are unable to anticipate that mum will return eventually. They experience her absence and they experience a sense of loss and fear. Each day is a new abandonment. It is accepted that infants suffer some distress when first experiencing the daily abandonment at nursery. The collective narrative around what happens next is that the baby ‘gets used to it’. In a sense, they do get used to it, but not in a positive way. Gradually, babies learn that however hard they cry, mum is not going to respond - she is not there and she is not coming. They give up asking. Babies receive messages about themselves from this experience, that they carry for a lifetime. Depending on other factors like how their relationship is with their parents when they are together, their nature or personality type, the specific experience of the specific nursery including the adults and children with whom they share it and other home influences such as culture, social and economic context, etc. Their views of themself might be: They are ineffective at getting their needs met; they are not very important to their parents; their needs don’t matter; they are disappointing to their parents; they have done something wrong and are being punished and so on. These messages about the self can lead to later anger/aggression, anxiety, low self esteem, depression, etc.
No amount of spending on adult pleasures like a nice house, holidays or even theme park days out can compensate for the disruption in attachment that spending hours a day away from parents leads to. Our culture has nurtured beliefs that work/career and the material comforts it provides are the measures of our success as human beings. We often talk the talk around our values of love and care and other high moral virtues, but do we really live? For the first 30 months of our children’s lives they need us - their parents and parental love and care more than anything else. It has become a norm to try to effect compensation of time by organising meal and bedtimes around those that work for adults. If children eat later with their parents and go to bed later, parents are able to spend weekday time with their children. For the adults this works but inevitably, children are not getting sufficient sleep as they must also wake up on the adult schedule to get to nursery in time for parents to get to work.
I’d like to share this podcast - it is an interview by Steven Bartlett with Emma Komisar, a clinical social worker, psychoanalyst and parent guidance expert. She has 3 years old as the crucial point at which children can safely spend more time away from their primary carer/s. I agree with her, I will continue to use 30 months though as my 'cut off point' as my intention is to offer the absolute minimum necessary for child emotional health and have it seem like a smaller ‘sacrifice’ for parents. Emma Komisar writes her books with reference to relevant research - she is careful to support her position with hard evidence.
We cannot change the past but we can shape the future by making choices based on better information, accepting that in our ignorance we made choices that were not so helpful or healthy, and adopting a will to effect change. This applies to society as well as to us as individuals - many individual changes lead to societal changes.
Having children is a choice. We do not have to have them. It is ok to make a choice not to have them if we cannot fit them into our lives in a way that they can flourish. We must consider what our values are, what our priorities are, whether we really live them and whether we are prepared to make adjustments to live them - sometimes costly adjustments in terms of economics, perceived worth and status, lifestyle etc. We cannot realistically have it all. No-one can at any time. There are always choices to be made - we choose one path and simultaneously choose against another.
Poverty can be linked to adverse childhood experiences, but not always. There are plenty of parents on very low incomes who are able to nurture emotionally secure children. Poverty is a relative term and, as well, it is often accompanied by other factors that contribute to it being implicated in childhood adverse experiences. To assume that because we are middle class and able to provide material comforts for our children, they will emerge from the emotional deficit associated with day nursery unharmed.