The International Foundation for the Preservation of the Family, headquartered in Naples, Florida, has assembled a remarkable group of scholars, academics and physicians from all over the world who exchange papers discussing the links between family, character and culture. Among the Foundation’s projects is the gathering of scientific research and medical evidence on day care.
This research shows, as succinctly expressed by child psychologist John Bowlby of London’s Tavistock Clinic, that “The primary goal of parenting should be to give a child a lifelong sense of security – a secure base from which he can explore the world, and to which he can return, knowing he will be welcomed, nourished, comforted and reassured.”
Bowlby is one of many psychologists who emphasize the importance of what is called the “attachment theory.” The child’s ability to establish intimate emotional bonds throughout life, as well as his mental health and effective functioning, depend on the strength of quality of his attachment to his parents, particularly his physical and emotional contact with his mother.
Research by Mary Ainsworth at the University of Virginia, Mary Main at the University of California, and Alan Sroufe at the University of Minnesota has consistently shown that the pattern of attachment developed in infancy and early childhood is profoundly influenced by the mother’s ready availability, her sensitivity to her child’s signals, and her responsiveness to his need for comfort and protection.
When a child is confident that his mother is available, responsive and helpful, he develops a pattern of secure attachment. Extensive research shows how patterns of attachment that have been developed by 12 months of age are not only highly indicative of how the child will act in nursery school, but how he will act as an adolescent, as a young adult, and as a parent.
While the scientific and medical evidence shows the importance of a mother’s consistent and ready availability, it does not show the need of a perfect mother. Pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who was as influential in England as Dr. Benjamin Spock was in America, showed that the conditions for secure attachment are fulfilled with what he called “good-enough mothering” and “holding” the child.
Winnicott said that adequate “holding” of a baby is indispensable to emotional development and essential for developing the child’s capacity for empathy. The child should experience his mother as a “good and happy” person, and should also know that his mother sees her infant as a “good and happy” person.
Later, the child internalizes and draws on these images to comfort himself when the mother is not present. These same images are a reservoir from which the child can draw as he comforts others in his adult life.
Pennsylvania State University psychologist Jay Belsky (a former advocate of daycare) has concluded that recent research reveals that infant daycare is “a risk factor for the development of insecure infant-parent attachment, noncompliance and aggression.” Fifty percent of the daycare children he studied developed insecure attachments to their mothers and a wide range of negative behaviors.
Of course all children’s behavior problems cannot be blamed on daycare. Belsky describes what he called the “ecology” of daycare, by which he means the child’s total environment including the mother’s and father’s emotional attitudes and skills, the family’s socio-economic circumstances, and the behavior of the mother upon reunion with the child.
Recent research by other scholars confirms that the greatest risk in non-maternal care come from the failure of mother-infant attachment which results from frequent and prolonged separations. Daycare infants are more likely to cry, more likely to be troublemakers, more likely to withdraw and be loners, more easily influenced by their peers, less cooperative with adults, and less likely to pursue tasks to completion.
While it would be wrong to conclude that daycare harms all children, it clearly adds a significant level of extra distress and conflict to the all-important infant-mother-father relationship.
The Foundation concludes that the mothering process needs to be re-examined and re-valued so that infants can have the secure attachment which provides the basis for self-reliance, self-regulation, and ultimately the capacity for independence combined with the ability to develop mature adult relationships.
