Child-Care and the Psychology of Development

Elly Singer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351678230
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Are child-care centres good for children? How can we provide good day-care? Feminists have long argued for the provision of day-care facilities so that mothers may be free to work outside the home. The call had enjoyed little support from politicians and experts, however. Feminists had been seen to stand for women's interests, and psychologists and pedagogues for children's – as if the two were opposed. Only in the early 1990s had the opinions of politicians and experts begun to change. Yet, even so, a positive policy on day-care was still lacking.

Originally published in 1992, Elly Singer's exciting book shed a fresh and critical light on its subject. She exposes the preoccupations and contradictions of mainstream developmental psychology and its experts, shows how their theories blind them to many important questions, and reveals the almost total denial by mainstream psychology of the daily realities of parents and their children at the time. Elly Singer then proposes fresh ways of thinking to meet the new and different circumstances in which children and parents find themselves in contemporary society.

Chapter 1

Women and children

The provision of child-care facilities is extremely controversial. It is an area in which the two-sided attitudes towards women and children can become bitter.

At the end of the sixties, mothers who wanted to work outside the home took action to demand good and affordable child-care facilities. Both politicians and experts reacted with shock. Daily separations from the mother were supposed to be very damaging to the child; the child was not to be sacrificed to the mother.

Nowadays, the moral indignation towards mothers working outside the home has died down, but the undertone of condemnation still remains. While even more mothers now work outside the home without good child-care facilities, the prevailing attitude is still one of hesitation and restraint. Where is the sense of responsibility which is necessary for mothers to be able to entrust part of the child-care to others?

In the discussion on child-care facilities, the child’s ‘best interests’ are very often placed opposite the mother’s, as though the interests of children are quite irreconcilable with the interests of their mothers; as though fathers and other adults have no responsibility to care for children. What has made us think like this? This question has led me on a search through history, to find the background to these ways of thinking about mothers and children.

THE ‘ANTI-CHILD-CARE FACILITIES’ ATTITUDE IN WESTERN COUNTRIES.

I started my research in the Netherlands, but soon realized that the provision of child-care facilities is still a controversial issue in other Western, industrialized countries. With the exception of the Scandinavian countries, all West European countries suffer, to some extent, from a lack of arrangements, support and facilities for the care of the children of working mothers (Phillips and Moss, 1988). The possibilities for taking leave of absence are far too restricted for mothers and fathers; there is a lack of part-time jobs, or jobs with flexible working hours; fathers play a relatively small part in the daily care of children; there is a lack of good and affordable child-care facilities; workers in child-care are underpaid. In the United States the situation was apparently not much better (Kamerman and Kahn, 1981; Phillips, 1990).

Generally speaking, therefore, the arrangements for the children of mothers working outside the home are inadequate. Compared to other West European countries, the Netherlands, along with England and Ireland, are the countries which have made the fewest arrangements, and have the lowest percentage of working mothers. This is apparent from an international study carried out in EEC countries in 1987 (Phillips and Moss, 1988). For instance, in Denmark, a country with an extensive system of child-care facilities subsidized by the government, more than 70 per cent of mothers with children under the age of 5, work for thirty or more hours a week outside the home. In France and Belgium, where there are fewer facilities than Denmark but more than in the Netherlands and England, approximately 50 per cent of mothers work outside the home. In the Netherlands, Ireland and England, less than 30 per cent of mothers work outside the home; many of these mothers work only nineteen hours a week or less. In these countries, policies as well as work participation are determined by woman’s caring role within the family.

However, policies and women’s work participation do not necessarily have to be so clearly connected. For instance, in the United States in 1987, nearly 60 per cent of the mothers with children under the age of 6 were working outside the home, many of them full-time, while the policy of the authorities at central and local level were extremely reserved (Phillips, 1990). The child-care facilities there are nearly all in the hands of private enterprise. These take the form of profit-making centres. Family day-care, private arrangements for care-taking at home, and care-takers for the family are also used. Child-care in the United States has barely any status, a fact made apparent in the underpayment of the teachers and care-takers. An extremely large staff turn-over, a lack of trained staff and poor quality child-care facilities also confirm the low status accorded to workers in this field. Attitudes remain restricted to the ideal of the mother at home, or parents who take care of the daily needs of their children themselves. In practice, reality is different for the majority of families.

The lack of arrangements and facilities for children and working mothers points not only to discrimination against women working outside the home, but also to the undervaluation of the caring task that mothers have traditionally fulfilled at home: in financial terms, caring for children is hardly worthwhile!

Consequently, in all the Western industrialized countries, with the exception of Scandinavia, there is an affinity between the policies towards mothers working outside the home. At a scientific level there also seem to be affinities in thought on child-care outside the home. The present Dutch child studies are strongly orientated to research which is being done in the United States and England. Bowlby’s and Ainsworth’s attachment theory are extremely influential. This theory causes child-care outside the home to be regarded with suspicion: child-care outside the home is supposedly a risk-factor (Belsky, 1988). Other researchers try to approach study of child-care facilities with a more positive attitude. How does it work, and what can or needs to be done better (Clarke-Stewart, 1989; Phillips, 1990)? In the Anglo-Saxon research world, the discussion is raised again and again on whether child-care outside the home is bad, and the advocates and opponents repeatedly cross swords.

RECONSIDERATION

Meanwhile, the number of working mothers is growing fast. In 1970, 29 per cent of mothers with children under the age of 6 were working in the United States; in 1980 this percentage had risen to 43 per cent; in 1990 to 58 per cent; and in 1995 two-thirds of all pre-school-age children will have a mother in the work force (Phillips, 1990). In the Netherlands the number of mothers working is much smaller, but it is growing. In the Netherlands the percentage of working mothers with children up to the age of 4 rose from 9 per cent in 1971, to 15.6 per cent in 1979 and 24.8 per cent in 1985. In 1995 it is expected that 30 per cent of mothers with pre-school children will be working outside the home (Singer, 1989; Phillips and Moss, 1988).

In spite of the conservative policy and the experts’ warnings, the number of child-care facilities is also growing rapidly, even though in the United States, England and the Netherlands, most children are cared for by family, care-taker at home or child-minders. The numbers of child-care centres and organized guest-parent care groups are also growing. In 1969 there were sixty-five day-care centres in the Netherlands, mainly for families with financial or socio-medical problems. In 1975 there were 162 day-care centres also being used by mothers wanting to work outside the home; in 1984 the number had risen to 240; and in 1989 there were 635. At a rough estimate only about 1 per cent of all 0–4-year-olds attend a day-care centre, but this percentage is a great deal higher in the city areas where industry also organizes child-care centres for its employees. It is apparent from the United States that an explosive growth of child day-care centres is possible. There, in 1965 between 2 and 6 per cent of children under the age of 3 years attended a day-care centre, while at the present time more than 20 per cent of this age group are now attending a day-care centre. Between 1982 and 1985 the percentage of children under 1 year of age, and in day-care centres, grew from 8 to 18 per cent (Phillips, 1990).

In countries like the Netherlands, the United States and Britain, with a conservative child-care policy, systematic data on the quality of care is lacking. There is also no control, or hardly any, on the quality of this care. Now and then scandalous stories come to light: of British child minders with far too many children, with no outdoor play area, who care minimally for the children and just try to keep them quiet (Mayall and Petrie, 1977; Jackson and Jackson, 1979): of Dutch child-care centres that have not even been checked for basic fire safety (FNV, 1989); and of American day-care centres where the staff work for less than a year, and children are continually being confronted with changing teachers and groups (Whitebook, Howes and Phillips, 1990).

How long can child-care experts and politicians permit themselves to ignore what is going on within child-care facilities? How long will we continue the discussion about the (supposedly) damaging effects of child-care outside the home on young children’s development, without doing our utmost to improve the situation for children and working parents?

If, in the future, large groups of children are going to spend three to five days a week outside the family from a very young age, it can only mean a great change in the familiar pattern of upbringing. New traditions of upbringing are never developed without difficulties and risks which have to be appreciated. Child-care outside the home can bring an ideal of upbringing closer, but it can also cause a great deal of misery, if fast and cheap expansion is sought at the cost of quality.

The wish to clear the way for developmental-psychological discussions with an eye to the problems of child-care facilities, without idealizing the ‘at home with mother’ situation, has made me reconsider the current developmental-psychological theories about mothers, children and child-care outside the home. I wanted to know why thinking in opposites was so strong; why policy makers, as well as pedagogues and developmental psychologists, all use the terms ‘child-orientated’ and ‘mother orientated’ as though the interests of working mothers and children are totally opposed. I also wanted to study to what extent the current theories of early child development can be used in empirical research into the development of children who, from early babyhood, have been cared for outside the home for part of the day. Many developmental psychologists had been extremely negative about care outside the home for very young children, and this attitude could be related to the basic concepts of their theories. To what extent are the elements of family upbringing and child-care facilities that are taken for granted, included at policy level, in developmental psychological terms and research? To what extent are we imprisoned in categories of thought from the past, making it impossible for us to ask the questions needed in a (future) situation where many children, from birth, are going to spend a large part of their day outside the home?

THE CHILD AS A ‘CULTURAL INVENTION’

The reconsideration of the philosophies on children and motherhood that I had in mind corresponded to a broader tendency towards a more critical reflection on the subject within developmental psychology. During the past decade various studies have appeared, questioning the status of scientific knowledge about children in our society. For instance, John and Elizabeth Newson, (1974), pointed to the curious fact that there is no other culture which produces and consumes so much knowledge about children, but, at the same time, that there is no other culture with so much uncertainty amongst its parents/mothers. ‘The cult of child psychology’ is, according to them, a uniquely Western phenomenon. Feminist researchers have shown how popularized scientific knowledge is brought into the home through women’s magazines, in order to tell mothers about the complexity of their children’s inner life, and how it is the mother’s fault if their children get into difficulties and have too many problems (Ehrenreich and English, 1979; Riley, 1983). Others, like Christopher Lasch (1977), were not so concerned about the mothers’ difficult position, but more about the undermining of parental/fatherly authority by the army of experts armed with scientific knowledge marching into the private family environment. Micha de Winter (1986) analysed the dream of the predictable child, fed by a science that promises the controllability of life.

In ‘The American child and other cultural inventions’ (1983), William Kessen defends the statement that the child, as well as the developmental psychologist, are both cultural inventions. Both have to be understood as parts of a broader culture, and both are influenced by ‘greater powers’ within the culture. Changes in Western culture which have significantly altered the lives of and the thought on children are: industrialization, the separation of paid work outside the home from the family, the separation of the men’s world from the women’s world, and the creation of class differences. A separate world was created where children were allowed to play, learn and spend their free time, first in the upper and middle classes, who were able to afford a nursery, nanny or mother at home. Poor children were herded together in national schools.

According to Kessen, developmental psychology is one of the creative powers behind the new images of children. As a science, it fed the idea that people could be ‘made’ through the application of scientific knowledge to the practice of child rearing. Developmental psychology gave parents information about their children through magazines and institutions for help and advice on child rearing; they gave schools and therapeutic institutions the instruments with which to measure intelligence and development, and diagnose problems. Various developmental psychologists invented various types of children. As an example of this Kessen mentioned Darwin, who observed his son Doddy and discovered ‘emotions’; Baldwin looked at his daughter Polly and discovered ‘thought’; Freud observed Anna and saw ‘fulfilment of desire’; Watson found ‘unconditioned responses’ in his son Billy, and Piaget found ‘adaptive assimilation’ in his daughter Jacqueline. In practice, these scientific terms have become images of how children are, overshadowing the other experiences of parents, teachers and the children themselves. According to Kessen, developmental psychology has developed from a Western culture where children are seen as a separate category, and thus given their own space. In turn, developmental psychology influences the way children are treated in our culture. For this reason Kessen advocates a historical-cultural developmental psychology.

In ‘Development in social context’ (1986), David Ingleby surveys critical streams within developmental psychology, which have developed independently in the United States and England. He attempted not only to describe human development in an historical context within these streams, but at the same time to explain the origin of developmental psychology as a science, and in its influence on the images of children, child rearing and manners. For the American discussion, the Houston Symposium held in 1981 on The Child and Other Cultural Inventions’ is, amongst others, of importance. Milestones in the English discussion were The Integration of a Child into a Social World (1974), the follow-up to this, Children of Social Worlds (1986), and Changing the Subject (1984).

All these streams have in common the fact that their roots can be found in criticism of the positivist view of science, current within Anglo-Saxon orientated developmental psychology. In the first place there is criticism of the assumption of the existence of universal laws at work ‘in’ the child, separate from the social context in which it lives. In discussions about child-care outside the home, we come across this assumption in advocates as well as opponents, who make statements about ‘the influence’ of the child-care centre on ‘the development’ of ‘the child’. ‘The child’ could manage quite well without its mother during the day; ‘the child’ would be damaged by daily separations - as though all children experience child-care centres in the same fashion, or as though all mothers are the same!

A second critical point has a bearing on what is called the ‘technological Utopia’. Scientific knowledge of universal laws of development is supposedly applicable to the improvement of the practice of child rearing. Scientific knowledge is supposedly superior to people’s wisdom or ‘laymen’s’ knowledge. This supposition implies the conviction that non-scientists, particularly parents and teachers, need expert scientific guidance. ‘Real’ knowledge must replace superstition; in this way, scientifically descriptive statements become normative statements on how things should be done. But just how ‘true’ and how ‘rational’ is our present-day scientific knowledge of children?

A third criticism concerns the values and standards that implicitly play a role in the production of knowledge. Contrary to the self-image of rationality, theories include all sorts of prejudices against the socially lower classes and ethnic minorities. In women’s studies the prejudices against women and men and particularly against mothers have been pointed out.

A final criticism concerns the lack of an historical awareness of the social meaning of scientific knowledge within the exercise of the science of positivism. It is wrongly assumed that developmental psychology only describes and explains the development of children/adults. However, science has a great influence on people’s lives, because of the manner in which their development is conceptualized (Freud’s fulfilment of desire; Watson’s conditioned reflexes), the production of techniques for gaining knowledge (tests, observation schedules and so on) and the production of techniques for interventions in mental functioning (for instance, conditioning techniques or techniques on group dynamics). This influence is often transmitted by scientifically schooled experts on child rearing, who give help and advice to parents and teachers. Developmental psychology not only registers, it also collaborates in the ‘invention of children’.

Within the streams mentioned by Ingleby (1986), the criticism of developmental psychology orientated to positivism is, to a large degree, unanimous. But their unanimity ends here. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Women and children
• 2 ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me…’: the infant school movement during the first half of the nineteenth century
• 3 The power of first impressions: the first attempts to design a child-centred pedagogy
• 4 Women’s science: Froebel, the kindergarten movement and feminism
• 5 Laboratories of human relationships: the rise of a scientific pedagogy in the United States, and the role of the nursery schools in this process (1890–1940)
• 6 Regulating emotions: maternal love, emotional bonds and discipline
• 7 Project Head Start: efforts to break the cycle of deprivation
• 8 Attachment theory and day-care: sensitive mothers and the feminist struggle for child-care facilities
• 9 Conclusions
• References
• Name index
• Subject index