Time for Parenting...

...because raising children is a full-time job

October 2002 Newsletter

From the chair; From the Editor; The Name Change Debate; Make Mothers Matter; What the papers say; Parliament and Positive Parenting;; Parent Effectiveness Training; Breast is best

Make mothers matter

We pay almost anyone to look after infants except their mothers - by Peter S. Cook

Evidence that good mothering matters, both for the individual and for society, is steadily growing. New reports from the Early Child Care Network of the US National Institute for Child Health and Development increase concerns about early childcare and its effects on young people. Some 25 top US scholars co-ordinate this multi-million dollar study, following more than 1000 babies from birth, to compare the effects of maternal care with various alternatives. Fathering is important, but this article is about mothering.

In Australia we fund the Institute of Family Studies for expertise in family matters. In 1994 it published Effects of Child Care on Young Children: Forty Years of Research by Gay Ochiltree. She dismissed research suggesting risks in early childcare, especially US studies, arguing that Australian childcare is so good that American findings of adverse outcomes don't apply. She claimed: "No evidence has been found that good quality childcare harms children."

The NICHD Network reported in American Educational Research Journal that, although higher quality childcare was associated with better cognitive performance at 4½, the more time during these four and a half years that these children had spent in any type of non-maternal childcare, regardless of its quality, the more assertiveness, disobedience and aggression they showed with adults, both in kindergarten and at home.

At school one year later, they continued to be more aggressive and disobedient, not just assertive or independent. So non-maternal childcare, whatever its quality, is associated with important risks.

NICHD warns that even modest adverse effects on behaviour can have serious social consequences when large numbers of children are affected.

NICHD studies also found that when children spent more time in childcare, their mothers displayed less sensitivity when interacting with them at six, 15, 24, and 36 months of age. Sensitive, responsive mothering through the early years was the best predictor of social competence at six years, which in turn predicts schooling success.

Early childcare also precludes longer breastfeeding, which, besides better health, is known to give significantly higher IQs in adults (Journal of the American Medical Association, May 8).

The movement for women's "liberation", while advancing women in the workplace, devalued and undermined their role as mothers. This denied infants' needs for mothering, and mothers' needs to provide it.
Healthy mothering includes breastfeeding, holding, carrying, attachment bonds, and making infants feel loved. These basic needs of infants are hardly met in institutional childcare, especially when profits must be maximised in private centres. Professor Jay Belsky, a distinguished member of the NICHD Network, described a staff ratio of one carer to five infants under two (the NSW standard) as nobody's idea of quality, but rather a licence to neglect.

Childcare is now one of Australia's most profitable growth "industries" (BRW Rich 200, February 2). It promotes circumstances that fuel its own expansion, as two-income couples bid up the price of homes, and two incomes are needed to raise a family. Mothering is out. Childcare is in. We pay almost anyone to look after infants except their mothers. Mothering and fathering happen after work in "quality" time.

Yet Penelope Leach's large survey found that most child development professionals privately believe it's best for infants to be cared for mostly by their mothers. Like the NICHD studies, they don't support the view that parents are interchangeable, but that they complement each other.

We need to do whatever it takes to help women give their babies and young children the lifelong benefits of high quality mothering, and stop subsidising an ideology that promotes risky and inadequate substitutes.

Peter S. Cook is a retired consultant child psychiatrist who writes on child and family mental health.

This article was first published on 24th July 2002