Empathic Parenting

The public image of daycare is of pre-school children: three and four year olds playing together in the nurseries, playgroups and nursery classes that should indeed be available to all. These are the images that inform campaigns for workplace nurseries, or the transformation of sessional playgroups into full daycare, but they do not reflect the reality which is that thousands of babies and toddlers are already in daycare and that thousands more will be placed in groups as they become available.

United States experience has some chastening lessons for all of us. In many areas and jobs six weeks is a long maternity leave; risky to ask for unless you are very valuable to your employer. Some maternity units will keep newborns while mothers return to work on day four and once they are taken home there are "lollypop wards" offering emergency daycare when children's fevers and colds would otherwise keep them (and a parent) at home. Once we forget that babies need their mothers or beloved mother-figures, it is easy to forget that to put a sick baby into a stranger's hands is cruelty. There are lots of illnesses. Some members of The American Paediatric Association reckons that under-ones in group-care have eight times as many colds and other infections as babies cared for in family environments. There is work going on to try and provide earlier immunization against the most serious - like H-flu, one cause of epidemic Meningitis. Nobody wants them sick, but nobody wants them at home where they are less likely to get sick.

If you don't mind his or her distress at being left, any well-meaning adult can give a baby adequate care for a couple of hours. That's the justification for using unknown baby-sitters and conference-creches. S/he may not like it but s/he will not suffer developmental damage. Full time care, day after day, is dramatically different. Babies don't have to have the "full time exclusive mothering" wrongly associated to John Bowlby and used to isolate women in the fifties. But in rejecting that, we are swinging further and further the other way, assuming that more and more mothers will wish to leave their babies for longer and longer days at younger and younger ages. The daycare debate is even less aware of infant needs than it was ten years ago.

Babies and young toddlers absolutely require continuous 24-hours a day care, consistently given by the same known and loving people. If those caregivers need not be parents, they do need a parent-like commitment that is rare outside the vested interests and social expectations of family roles.

A new baby has no concept of herself as a separate being. S/he acquires the foundations of self-image, self confidence and social competence by using carers as extensions of herself and as mirrors, reflecting her impacts back to her. It isn't "instinct" that makes her smile when she is pleased; it's the adult's consistent pleased response that feeds back pleasure. If you are smiling and chatting to a three-month baby and you suddenly go silent and serious, she will quiet, sober, stare and then cry. Once a baby expects particular responses, not getting them is confusing and distressing. She will try for expected responses from strangers but given a succession, each with subtly different expressions and body-language, she will lose track of who she is and panic. Wouldn't you panic if every mirror showed you a different face?

Discovering her own separateness goes with recognizing other individuals and coping with it depends on managing them, now and through the autonomy-crisis of toddlerhood. She must accept that people can leave while she sleeps, but she needs to know she can get them back with cries or calls; that raised arms produce cuddles; attempted words are understood and all social advances are always answered. All babies are helpless, but the ones who feel damagingly helpless in the longer-term are the ones who cannot feel competent to get a consistent response from caring adults.

Only adults who know, have known, and will go on knowing the individual baby can provide that vital sense of growing empowerment. Not all babies who are brought up in their own homes or the homes of individual caregivers get it, but babies and toddlers in full-time group care cannot get it because group care means constant changes of staff.

Currently, childcare is low-paid, demanding work. In group settings employers fight to keep staff by improving conditions, but every concession to adult needs reduces fulfillment of childrens'. Split-shifts to cover the long nursery day reduce adult hours by doubling the number of people with whom babies must interact. Lunch breaks, sick leave, vacations and in-service training course, produce such constant staff movement that case studies suggest an average of seven different people a day and fifteen a week (some of them strangers "filling in") handling each child. And still they leave: the "mother figure" in charge of each "family group" may change three times in a year.

Individual carers are better placed to meet babies needs. They have only one child of any particular age and stage to cope with and this is vital. When you cope with two or three at once, there is no way you can simultaneously respond to messages about milk, cuddles, and dropped toys. ( ask anyone who has triplets). That is not something our present society readily acknowledges, though. After all, one-to-one care by someone outside the family offers no economies of scale. If it releases anyone to fill the skill-shortage it does so only by leaving babies with less-skilled - or at least less well paid adults, an uncomfortably colonialist thought. So acknowledgment of babies needs for individual care would mean admitting that where a parent wanted to be at home with a child, s/he was the obvious caregiver and should be economically supported in that choice.

Finding someone who will do, as a job, what we expect, but do not help, mothers to do for love, isn't easy. The more hours a child has to spend with a caretaker, the more completely she will be in charge of his life and upbringing and the more she will impinge on other aspects of family life. Well-off parents hope to replace themselves for their children by spending on trained resident nannies, but they will not work all day and get up for night feeds and nightmares (let alone clean the house) and many leave when "their" baby becomes a toddler because, unlike mothers, professionals can choose to work with children at age-stages they find easier and abandon children they find difficult.

If parents are only out to work part-time or one is working at home with an eye on things, a much more informal arrangement, with a daily mother's helper, or nanny shared with another family, may keep a child entirely safe and happy even if the caregiver is not "trained" or is over-inclined to buy sweets. If the baby truly loves her, it may not even matter if the parents do not, because they are keeping their household and their child firmly within their own control, using her help but not handing over to her. But few employers countenance or pay adequately for part-time work.

A close look at this business of individual baby care suggests that presently, the greatest hope for the small children who have least parent-care and no other family-member to serve as home base may lie with licensed childcare mothers who take them into their family homes. Most do it when their own older childrens' needs have changed, not as "just a job" but to use the skills they have acquired as mothers to finance their continued availability to their own children. It is their awareness of their own value as mothers that sometimes enables them to function as substitute mothers. But since these are extra market values that society does not recognize, childcare mothers are both undermined and underpaid as "unprofessional" and are therefore often the second choice of parents who need them most. Perhaps people truly believe that everyone who is employed in a daycare centre is a trained childcare worker, teacher or miracle worker...

Our society presently faces parents - or to be realistic, mothers, with an unenviable choice between leaving babies too early and for too long so as to meet their own need to go out to work, or abandoning work too completely and for too long, so as to meet children's needs for their care. That choice is not necessary. If we had the will to give children's needs priority, we could design flexible childcare programs that would meet them from birth through grade school without condemning mothers to poverty and boredom. It would take good will from employers over flexible working; a lot of hard thinking about the real role of our communities, some public money and a belief that being mothered matters. For example, well-staffed groups that combined care with pre-school education might be appropriate for most rising threes and over, but even for that age group alone, the advantages of siting them in a workplace would still be dubious. Can you imagine taking such a child on a packed computer train and bus twice daily? Or having his or her place dependent on a job the mother or father wanted to leave? Children would surely be better off if industry paid for community-based groups controlled by people (such as parents) who know about childcare.

Sited in community centers, such groups would become the obvious focal point for desperately needed and currently forgotten after-school and holiday care, giving brothers and sisters and local friends a shared base, separated from the different world of school. The same setting that met the needs of the 3-11's without their parents, could meet the needs of babies and toddlers with them. Used as a drop-in centre or club by parents and caregivers, such a centre could improve the quality of life for all of them by taking the isolation and boredom out of being home-based. Adults of both sexes would get to know each other, each others children and the professionals (hopefully local residents and often parents themselves). Babies and toddlers would get to know them too and "promotion" towards daycare for those whose parents were eager to return to outside work could be gradual and individually paced. Most babies could be left for a couple of hours occasionally, especially in an emergency. Many toddlers could be left part-time, building their confidence and independence towards readiness for the pre-school care group. There are partial models available in the superb "family centres" run by various childrens' charities and local authorities, but where they are necessarily open to families in special difficulty, these would be available to all.

It is easy to imagine these centres in the middle of a wider and wider network; the obvious place for the local toy library, for childrens' book exhibitions and childrens' theatre; home base for a Home-start team; a source of hands-on experience for adolescent parents-to-be, childcare students, future playgroup leaders and teachers; even a sensible place for a prenatal class and a pre-school immunization clinic... Serving the local area and employing local people, such centres could play a major part in giving communities back some sense of themselves as places where people actually live and relate to one another.

If this is a pipe-dream, present arrangements are a nightmare. Which shall we choose?