The major missing link for any child in daycare is a loving and long-term relationship with a specific carer (obviously not the mother). The secondary missing link is the artificial nature of almost everything a child learns and the words they hear.
Thus the impoverished nature of the speech and comprehension of so many children under age 2.
I understand that children need to be ‘ready’ for school. However, the prevailing opinion is that the sooner they are placed in a daycare or pre-school environment the faster they will be ‘ready’ and ‘socialised’.
Having prepared my own and other children for school I can comfortably say that staying at home with a loving carer (occasionally it’s their mother!) and learning about the real world can give a child verbal and cognitive abilities way beyond his or her peers.
Such attributes prepare them at the very least for reading, since their spoken and aural vocabulary will be at a high level. In many ways such children are overly prepared for the modern school environment compared with their peers; they might easily be bored by the mundane tasks school expects of them in the Reception Class (UK) or Kindergarten (US).
Even the one child I had who was slower to talk and read had an extraordinary level of comprehension which confounded his teacher every time she tested him. Conventional wisdom must have it that there can be no development of comprehension without the ability to read and write! That just isn’t so.
The nature of ‘real world’ living really pays off as a child matures.
Living in the sheltered world of daycare from 6 months of age for 4 years, school for 14 or more years, followed immediately by another 4 or 5 years of college doesn’t necessarily prepare any child/young adult for hitting the world in their 20’s. For most children they won’t have spent any time living in the real world.
Daycare from infancy and being cared for by barely qualified and somewhat temporary individuals is no way to grow up, albeit the preferred way in the 21st century.
However, we now have a generation of parents in their 30’s and 40’s who were raised that way. They simply don’t think at all about who is raising their children. “Good enough for me, good enough for my childrenâ€. The money is in their pockets to buy every material thing and service they need for them and their children.
We also have at least one generation, probably more, which knows nothing at all about raising a child for the first 5 years. Books tell otherwise since they are based on the reactions and behaviours of children who are daycared their whole lives – the new ‘norm’.
Do you really want your child to come home from daycare saying “Get out of my way bitch�