I’m not just referring to cheap childcare. Even childcare that is expensive and purports to offer ‘special’ methods can still be mediocre.
Parental care can be mediocre even when the parent is otherwise well qualified in their professional field like elementary school teachers, or when the parent titles themselves an ‘at home mother’ or an ‘at home father’.
I have concluded that it is the combination of modern (probably the US) interpretation of such ‘special’ methods of teaching and helping children develop or just plain ‘child minding’ (even by parents) that could be causing developmental delays.
Some parents may just scan the literature on certain child development or teaching methods, especially the one that recommends that the parent or teacher just sits and ‘observes’ the child, and figure that it doesn’t require anything of them.
The children of such parents will, for example: sit by themselves in the middle of a room at around 6 months of age and do NOTHING – they don’t even respond to an object put within their reach, they don’t smile or respond to the adult, they don’t even gurgle and they have what’s called a ‘flat affect’, a blank faced look.
Such children do become verbal (usually what I term hyper-verbal) yet are quite wooden in their conversations. Some become willful and do not comply with their parents’ wishes – frequently leading to dangerous safety issues.
Most of these children have so little real conversation in their lives that they don’t actually communicate at all.
Given the chance just listen to a child who communicates well at 22 months, as I did several months ago when I first wrote this blog (unfortunately these are very rare occurrences in my world!).
The child was highly verbal with a large, yet natural, vocabulary and plenty of purposeful receptive language. She was doing phenomenally well in all regards. She was not (should I say ‘of course’?) of US parentage she was English, probably of East Indian heritage like her mother.
I told her mother how impressed I was with her daughter’s verbal ability and how her child didn’t need to be in a school environment to become sociable. She already had perfectly acceptable social skills – far beyond the children in the facility the mother was briefly observing.
So tell me why should I see so few children who are communicating and receiving language so well?
I can only think that it is caused by mediocre care, be it at home or in any type of facility.