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Penelope Leach has been called the British equivalent to Benjamin Spock. She uses very plain and clear words to describe the process of attachment. She describes in this brief excerpt how and why changing caregivers damage a young child. She also quotes a U.K. study showing that the average number of new caregivers introduced to six month babies over a three month period was 15. Staff turnover in daycare centres in America is 40% per annum. On top of that we have childcare where a ratio of three to one is thought to be high quality! Stop for a moment and think what it would be like if you and your spouse had triplets. Your mother, grandmother and two or three friends would all be around to help because it would be seen as an enormous job to look after three babies. But in the rationalized jargon of the institutional daycare world, that's high quality daycare -- a ratio of 3 to 1. So shared caregivers are inevitable if we are trying to economize on nurturing of kids and changing caregivers are inevitable in any institution unless you run it like Auschwitz and not allow staff to take holidays, or to quit, or get sick, or get a job promotion and all the things that of necessity create changing staff. ...In the interests of him turning into a recognizably human being, we want the baby to notice that everything he does has an effect and we want him gradually to grasp the range of effects which he has. He can only do this at optimum speed if the people he is affecting are always the same; only then will the range of responses his actions evoke be sufficiently internally consistent to be comprehensible and repeatable. And for the baby, as for anybody else, learning is impossible without understanding and repetition. Try remembering a simple telephone number in Chinese when you’ve been told it once and you will see what I mean. As well as noticing the effects of his actions, we also want the baby to take increasingly mature and subtle actions into his repertoire. Early on, when he needs something, he will cry until it is produced, the need dies down or he is distracted into forgetting it. But crying until something happens is a very basic level of communicative action and not one which we want our new people kept at for long. The baby must learn that facial expressions, hand and body gestures, sounds and, eventually, words are also effective. This kind of learning depends on being with people who ‘know’ and ‘understand’ him, because it is only their reaction to his new (and perhaps initially random) action which will tell him to try it again. A mother knows her baby’s face so well that when he reaches a point where particular lip-quivering things happen to it just before he cries she will certainly notice. Eventually there will come a time when she reacts to that expression, instead of waiting for the cry and the baby notices that she has done so. In the same way, she knows the baby’s hand gestures and the objects he plays with. The two pieces of information together lead to the day when the wildly-flailing arms that are part of ‘I want’, lead her to the object he actually wanted. Neither of them will ever know how much of the sequence was deliberate, nor how many times before she had responded similarly to a similar gesture but picked the ‘wrong’ object. All that will matter is that the baby has got what he wanted by a new, repeatable and comparatively sophisticated method. She knows his voice, too, and since most of the deliberate sounds he utters are precursors of speech and speech is probably the most vital accomplishment in his humanity, her knowledge is important. If you do not know a baby well enough to differentiate between the ‘Uh-uh-uh’ of ‘I want’ and the ‘Uh-uh-uh’of ‘I’m tired’, you cannot contribute to his early language development. A baby who does not have anybody special, but is cared for by many wellmeaning strangers in turn, or one who is cared for sketchily and without concentration, sharing his caretaker with other needful small people, is like an adult who moves from country to country, knowing the language of none. Baby and adult must each rely on the universal language of gross gesture and tolerate high levels of isolation and low levels of understanding. Neither can develop any subtlety of communication nor certainty as to whether or why things have been understood or have taken place. The adult returns home with relief. The baby had better stay there. Many babies start life with the special people who are usually their parents but then, when emotional attachment, feelings of effectiveness and communication have begun to develop, find themselves with strangers. Depending on his age and maturity and his previous experiences, such a baby will have developed a wide range of more or less subtle cues and he will be beginning to have expectations about people’s responses to them. Having those cues missed or misinterpreted, or receiving responses which are new to him or out of line with anything he knows, will shake his confidence. But he is still a survivor. If the strangers are part- or full-time substitute parents who, once on the scene, remain constantly part of his life, he will gradually adapt. If his mother is around to help him make the transition, to ‘translate him’ for the newcomers and to blend their ‘style’ with her own, he will adapt more quickly. The new people will be made ‘special’. He will teach them to understand him and to respond to him just as he taught his mother. But if the newcomers to his life have no time to ‘listen’ to him, concentrate on him, feel their way with him, perhaps because he is now part of a group or perhaps because they are part of a stream of short-term caretakers, his development may truly suffer... ...The kind of multiple-care which a baby is likely to receive in any kind of institutional group is a very different matter. Staff in charge of some of the best residential and day nurseries in the country have lavished ingenuity, devotion and all the money they could get on trying to provide stability of care for the babies in their charge. It cannot be done. The institution does not only have babies to cope with, it also has staff. Their training, rotation-for-experience, promotion, holidays and sickness produce an ever-changing array of caretakers. The baby will make no objection because he does not yet know one from another, but his learning of one from another may be delayed if there is no ‘special’ one who lasts. In extreme instances, babies who were cared for in institutions from very early on have grown into childhood still with the emotional promiscuity appropriate to only the first weeks of life. It is as if the lack of anyone ‘special’ had kept them at the stage of being interested in everyone but loving no one, indefinitely... Excerpted with permission from Penguin Books Ltd. from WHO CARES? by Penelope Leach 1979. Dr. Leach has written many books on child care, the best seller YOUR BABY & CHILD among them. Her most recent book is CHILDREN FIRST What our society must do - and is not doing - for our children today, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1994. "I do not think it is possible to overemphasize these twin factors of individuality and continuity in a baby's care. Except in extreme cases - as of physical cruelty, dangerous neglect or the total maternal withdrawal that sometimes comes with mental illness - they override every other feature distinguishing "good" from "bad". "A UK study showed that the average number of new caregivers introduced to six months babies over a three year period was fifteen." "Staff turnover in most American daycare centers is 40% per annum." |
