Читать книгу Raising Babies: Should under 3s go to nursery? - Steve Biddulph, Steve Biddulph - Страница 26

Childhood today is nothing like it was for preceding generations, especially for very young children. In 1981, only 24 per cent of mothers returned to work before their baby was one year old. Today the figure is over 60 per cent. (Of course, 95 per cent of fathers return to work too.) As a result, almost a quarter of a million UK children under three attend a day nursery full- or part-time.

Worldwide, the number of babies and toddlers spending all day in nursery care has quadrupled in just ten years. Daycare was originally intended for three- and four-year-olds, but its use has spread downwards; sometimes babies are now put into nurseries and crèches when they are just days old. The hours have got longer too: millions of children under three are in daycare centres ten hours a day, five days a week in America, Australia, Brazil, Japan and other industrialized countries across the globe.

This large-scale group care of the very young is a recent thing. It has happened without prior research or understanding (compared with, for instance, the invention of kindergarten, which was specifically designed with child development needs in mind). If it turns out that early childcare is a damaging thing, then millions of lives will have been adversely affected. As we will see later, the chemistry of these children’s bodies and even the structure of their brains may well turn out to be different – but not in good ways.