Empathic Parenting

"Here is a brief quote from Kagan. Jerome Kagan is often quoted in rebuttal of Burton White, who almost alone stood out in the United States questioning daycare's impact on children. But Kagan, who played tennis with White at Harvard, was always quoted to counter White, saying, well, we really don't know and we're not sure, and that was always taken to mean that it can't be proven that daycare causes any problems. But here is a quote from Kagan talking on the CBC back in 1983. He said, "You know, we really can't measure attachment all that well. All I can say is that the way we measure it now, we don't think there is any real problem with daycare and attachment, but it may turn out to be like thalidimide that we really just didn't know at the beginning."

...We don't know how to measure attachment. We use superficial measures, although the best available. With our superficial measures we found no difference in attachment. I wouldn't be surprised if in the next 20 years when there are more sensitive measures of attachment, maybe daycare children are less closely attached. Remember in my answer to your first question, the methods are crude. Given the methods we used, which were the best available, we found no difference in attachment. But that's like saying when they're investigating the pill [thalidomide], with those methods they found no harm in the pill. Now with better methods, they find - wait a minute, the pill is dangerous. Science is always tentative. So maybe there is a difference in attachment, we can't detect it yet...

Excerpted from The World of the Child, prepared by David Caley and presented by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on the Ideas Network, March 2-23, 1983.

Maybe daycare is like thalidomide