Читать книгу Raising Babies: Should under 3s go to nursery? - Steve Biddulph, Steve Biddulph - Страница 27
Two kinds of nursery user
ОглавлениеIn the past it was hard to find accurate statistics about the extent of daycare. Statistics for children under three often did not specify how early it began, and for how many hours a week. Finally, in the late 1990s, some of the statistics were ‘disaggregated’ – that is, broken down to see if there are different types of choices hidden away in the ‘average’ figures. A remarkable discovery was made – there are two distinct patterns of nursery care usage that indicate two different sets of parenting beliefs and values.1 In private, childcare researchers have come to call these two groups ‘slammers’ and ‘sliders’.
Slammers are parents who ‘slam’ their child into nursery care as early in life as possible, and for as many hours a day as they are permitted. This can be from as early as 7 am until 6 pm or even later, usually for the full working week. These parents are essentially only with their babies at night-time and weekends. This group has begun to be studied extensively, and they have proven to be very consistent. Slammers usually place their babies in a nursery well before they are six months of age, and once there, tend to keep them there, full-time, until the child starts school. That means their children spend over 12,000 hours in a nursery before their fifth birthday. (This is more hours than they will spend in the schoolroom in the following 12 years – an astonishing amount of time.) While slammers might deny it, the choices they make essentially say: ‘This child does not come first in my life – it fits around my life. My career/income/social life/education are the defining factors of my time and energy.’ Slammers are only a small group – less than 5 per cent of parents. That is a small percentage, but it’s still a lot of children – approximately 100,000 out of the UK’s 2 million under-threes, and the number is growing, especially among urban professionals. It is a lifestyle that is often represented in magazines, and by corporate propaganda, as the ideal and desirable lifestyle, influencing others to see this as the norm.