Kindergarten (Child’s Garden)
My grandmother would always explain life’s events as if it were related to her vegetable garden. When difficulties would arise, she would focus on the ‘root’ of the situation. While weeding the garden, removing the parts above ground were less important than what was below ground. Appearing with a small knife or spade she would say, “You need to use the knife to cut around the weed and remove the root. If you keep doing it your way, you will be back here again in a few days wondering how they got back so soon.” Always take the time to identify the root of the problem, she would say, so you do not have to keep reacting to situations over and over.
In the garden, there are many lessons to be learned about life. A garden needs patience, care and nurturing. When young children work in the garden in the evenings planting seeds, they expect results by the next morning. A sprout to care for, a carrot to eat or a bean to munch, all were weeks even months away. Gardening teaches children patience. And as each flower or stalk grows, they observe the texture, color, size, infestation, and soil making adjustments as it grew. When the plant looks wilted, water is forthcoming. When the tomato plants have larvae, children remove the pests. Digging in the soil gives them a sense of calm and peace. Identifying the leaves and flowers give them sorting skills. Children learn gratitude while tending a garden because the effort involved in its fruition is long standing. The experience of gardening reveals an appreciation for the gardener, the process of growing and everyone involved in preparing and distributing the food. These are lessons children so not apprehend when purchasing at a grocery store. There are life lessons in the garden.
Perhaps that is how in 1837 the name for children’s learning environments evolved to the father of the kindergarten movement, Frederick Frobel of Blacksburg, Germany. “I shall not call this an infant school because I do not intend the children should be schooled but to be allowed under the gentlest treatment to develop freely”. The initial desire was to teach children about the unity of God, humanity and nature in the context of religion through symbolic representations called ‘gifts’ (wooden spheres, cubes, cylinders and soft yarn). In 1856, Americanized kindergartens began in the US. Originally infant schools were developed for teaching children good behavior and moral attitudes in order to create an ideal society. However, when Elizabeth Peabody started one in Boston in 1860, more relevant American needs were addressed such as simple hand skills. Today, kindergartens are found in nearly every public school in the US even though federal legislation does not require children to attend school until the age of eight. The ‘garden for children’, free to explore the wonders of life has been transformed into the training ground for academic achievement and supposed success.
Day Care
The proponents of the child day care concept attempt to bring together respect for children, recognition of early childhood education and social concern to meet changing cultural patterns. In the eighteenth century, industries in England provided facilities for the children of workers. In Germany in 1802, France in 1844 and Italy and Japan, governments and industries began to fund services. During the Civil War, the US government for a short time provided money to support a few centers for children of war heroes. The New York Nursery and Philadelphia Day Nursery opened facilities for working mothers.
In the 1890’s, day nurseries abounded under philanthropic auspices in an attempt to get children out of residential institutions. Children were abandoned to these facilities for housing children (orphanages) because there were no mothers’ pensions or other forms of relief for single mothers who lost husbands to war. Single mothers overwhelmed with having to work and care for numerous children, abandoned them to residential facilities until, if ever, they could afford to keep them at home.
At the turn of the century, child study and research began to flourish. By 1928, universities established laboratories for preschool children (where children were studied by college students.). Day Care environments became sterile environments for analysis and examination. Children became objects of research. Procedures in nursery centers began to ‘improve’ and in 1933 the US government began to appropriate funds for nursery centers through the Federal Relief Administration. With the onset of World War II, women were drawn into industry in great numbers and the day care centers expanded to accommodate more children. At the close of the war, Federal funds for day care were withdrawn.
In 1958, The National Committee for the Day Care of Children was formed to secure funding. The first study on Day Care was released and recommended the resumption of public funding. Billions of Federal dollars were funneled into programs including Head Start (for poor young children) and Follow Through (for older children).
The numerous needs of day cares escalated to include: 1) centers of sufficient quality, quantity and distribution; 2) accessible pre-service and in-service for training professionals; 3) equitable salaries; 4) ancillary services; 5) sick bays for children; 6) arrangements for sick parents and transport; 7) night care; 8) short care needs; 9) greater continuity among programs; 10) AND funding, funding, funding as Day Care is an expensive undertaking. Institutional care became a complicated industry.
Violence and Separation of Mothers and Infants
Why does the government feel it’s care of infants, children and youths supercedes that of a parent’s love and affection? The modern Day Care is considered political necessity as the state has adopted the responsibility to overseer the health and well being of children. There are numerous in-depth studies that demonstrate that mother-infant bonding for the first six years of life is the most critical necessity for healthy living. Until a study performed by Dr. James Prescott of the National Institute of Health, research was inconclusive regarding the positive or negative impacts of day care to home care. According to the research, children with no previous nursery experience tend to catch up with children from such programs by third grade. There is little information on the impact of these programs with respect to socioeconomic variables, education, health, race, etc. One pertinent study by Gornicki in 1962 where children reared in their own homes in which the above variables were controlled as well as neurophysiological studies, reinforces empirical judgment that home care is desirable especially in the first six years of life to day care.
This powerful research study conducted over a 20-year period by Dr. Prescott at the National Institute of Health on care of young children systematically refutes the positive influences of day care for children. The original intent of the study was to determine the root causes of violence among young children especially preteen boys; predetermined or learned. Dr. Prescott, former NIH administrator, produced by Time Life a documentary entitled “Rock-A-Bye-Baby” describes the influence of diverse practices of infant care and child rearing on emotional development, both in humans and monkeys. The film is an accumulation of the twenty-year study to redesign healthy child rearing practices.
Dr. Prescott found that the physical contact of child with mother represents the first socio-emotional interaction the child experiences and lays the fundamentals for its later behaviors. Social animals isolated from their mothers and receiving no nurturing or physical affection develop severe depression and can die from such deprivation. In addition, mother-infant isolation that leads to sensory deprivation can cause developmental brain damage. These facts show that mother love has a neurological and biological basis that is essential to life.
Dr. Harry Harlow’s experiments with surrogate mothers have shown that monkeys, even when hungry, raised alone in an environment without mother and peers prefer to be with a cloth-covered mother surrogates without milk bottle rather than with a wire-care surrogate mother that provides a milk. They cling to their cloth-covered wooden dolls when they are frightened and they experience the same emotional stress other social animal’s experience when isolated from their surrogate mothers. These experiments show that the need for a loving relationship is stronger than the need for food even when starving. Love-hunger is stronger than food-hunger.
Drs. William Mason and Gershol Berkson documented the importance of body movement in mother-infant bonding as the single greatest contribution to understanding the mother-infant separation syndrome. Through their swinging mother surrogate experiments, monkeys raised singly in cages with stationary cloth mother surrogates were compared to those raised with swinging cloth mother surrogates. The infant monkeys reared on the stationary mother surrogate developed all of the abnormalities which isolation-reared monkeys develop- depression, social withdrawal, aversion to touch, stereotypical rocking and chronic toe and penis anti-social behavior. The infant monkeys reared on swinging surrogate mother developed normally with only minor stimulus-seeking behaviors. Depression, social withdrawal and avoidance of touch were absent in the swinging mother surrogate mother reared infants. The conclusions from these experiments were that children who are carried daily develop into healthier human beings.
There are good reasons why infants and children seek to be carried on the body of their mothers and fathers and love to be rocked to sleep. Dr. Prescott’s experiments examined the neurological and biological mechanisms involved in the process. Brain-behavioral studies on the effects of loss of mother love within the structural and functional development of the brain were conducted. These studies documented both the structural abnormalities of brain cells and functional abnormalities.
Studies by Dr. Selma Fraiberg on congenitally blind children demonstrated that when these blind children received sufficient body contact and movement stimulation from their parents, they develop normal social-emotional behaviors. These effects are dramatically portrayed in the documentary, as are the studies of Dr. Mary Neal who constructed a swinging bassinet for premature babies. The premature babies that were given this artificial body movement stimulation showed accelerated neurological maturation, as reflected in head movements, crawling, grasping and other reflexes. These infants gained weight faster, have less health problems, and were discharged earlier from the hospital than non-moved premature infants.
The documentary also demonstrates how a retarded institutionalized infant of six months of age can have retardation reversed when provided a loving substitute mother in an intense ‘one-to-one’ relationship. The longer the deprivation and the later the mother substitute is provided such infants, the less recovery from the damage is possible.
Dr. Prescott’s work now entitled “Somato-Sensory Affectional Deprivation Syndrome” demonstrates the importance of the sensory system in understanding the brain structures, processes and learning mechanisms involved in mother-infant social interaction. The sensory, neurological, and physical processes that mediate the brain behaviors resulting from the loss of mother love is critical to regulating the motor system of healthy children.
Since medieval and ancient times, it has been known that deprivation of sensory stimuli like the mothers’ voice and vision within early times of human life will cause irreversible mental retardation in the child. Also, research reiterates that prevention of child play, devoid of rules and standards, will cause intellectual deficiencies into adulthood. But eyes, ears and the nose are not the only human sensory systems.
Additionally, there are the two body sensor systems, the ‘somatosensors’. One is the sensor for maintaining orientation and upright walk. The other one is the skin, for sensing touch. These neglected senses are of overwhelming importance for the development of social abilities for adult life. Dr. Prescott found that its deprivation in childhood is a major cause for adult and teen violence. Not only has the amount of teen violence in the US risen over the past ten years but also there are 2,500 children serving life sentences for violent crimes a dramatic rise of the 250 a short time ago.
Much of the work at Stanford University by Carl Pribrim on the holographic brain specifically demonstrates that children, who are deprived of love and affection in the early years, develop split-brain phenomena. That is, the primal brain activates flight and fright while the forebrain, the seat of intelligence, shut down to a protective mode. Learning and fear cannot exist in the same domain. If a child has emotional scarring from feeling ‘unsafe’ while operating in the ‘fright’ modality, the child will not and cannot retain information nor build neurons conducive to learning. How many children today feel safety in the learning environment with violence in the schools or at home with parents at work?
In the late 1980’s, Swedish Pediatrics Associates became consumed with Dr. Prescott’s findings. Convincing legislators in that country of its significance, laws were passed so that mothers would be salaried to stay home and raise their children for the first year of the child’s life. Within a few years, studies conducted by the Pediatrics Associates concluded that the government was saving thousands of dollars, crime had diminished, as well as violence. The government then decided to extend the period to three years for a mother to stay home. The sayings to the government with this move were estimated to be $471,000 per youth offender ages 9-12. When American incarcerated youths are set in the equation, taxpayers pay $25,000- $28,000 per year per inmate. If only HALF of the inmates are deterred from this move, the savings in taxes would be staggering.
The following year, Sweden extended the law to allow fathers to stay home as well. Neighboring countries- Holland, Denmark and others- witnessing the effects of this legislation formulated laws that enabled mothers to stay home with their children for the first one to three years of life. Why hasn’t the United States sought to do the same?
Carl Sagan, physicist and Director of Laboratory for Planetary Studies, in the last chapter in his book Cosmos, hailed Dr. Prescott as one of the “only living scientist whose work speaks for the earth”. Dr. Prescott’s theory of sensory deprivation of physical affection during the formative years of brain development- failure to develop affectional bonds- is the major cause of alienation, violence and substance abuse in our culture. His studies of pathologically violent juveniles and adults propose that the cerebellum is the master integrating and regulatory system of sensory, emotional and motor processes. The study of 49 primitive countries correctly predicted violence due to lack of sensory development. Yet, this study has all been extinguished from view.
In 1990, the World Health Organization and UNICEF recommended breast-feeding for ‘two years and beyond’ (Innocenti Declaration). For at least one full year, the American Academy of Pediatrics in a revised policy statement “Breast-feeding and the Use of Human Milk” (Pediatrics, December 1997) advises mothers to breast-feed as well. This action was initiated due to mounting evidence that indicated that traditional ‘institutionalized day care” which involves ‘stranger care’ not only separates infants and very young children from their mothers and their nurturing love and affection, but also places them at ‘high-risk’ for abnormal brain-behavioral development. Day Care also impairs or prevents breast-feeding which is essential for normal immunological health and brain development. Breast-feeding is intimately linked to the child-care reform agenda. Yet, many newborns and infants are deprived of this best ‘head start’ because our socio-economic based child-care system discourages- if not prevents- women from being ‘nurturing mothers’ and from breast-feeding their infants for the time periods recommended by the WHO, UNISEF and the American Academy of Pediatrics. In edition, public breast-feeding has become an anti-social behavior rather than one that is honored and respected by American culture.
Will breast cancer research postulate that the inability for the mammalian glands to function normally in birthing mothers clog and form growths leading to future breast cancer? Could breast cancer be diverted simply by allowing mother to breast feed children for the first two years of life? How has the natural process of nurturing children become such a public, desensitized, disconnected matter?
Children who are breast feed have many benefits. The amino acid- tryptophan- necessary for brain serotonin development and other essential brain nutrients, is found only in breast-milk and is absent in formula milk. This also leads to special risks for abnormal brain development in formula fed infants. Deficiencies in brain serotonin have been well established in depressive, impulse control and violent behaviors. Some 600,000 children and youth have been prescribed serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) to control depression is indicative of the magnitude of the problem. Prozac prescriptions alone have increased 56% from last year for those 13-18 years of age. It is highly unlikely that any of these children have been breast-fed for two years or beyond. Common sense and hard science enable prevention of these societal solutions.
In January 1988 edition of Pediatrics, Dr. Horwood and Fergusson from the Christchurch School of Medicine, New Zealand noted, “Breast-feeding is associated with small but detectable increases in cognitive ability and educational achievement. These effects are 1) reflected in a range of measures including standardized tests, teacher ratings and academic outcomes in high school; and 2) long-lived, extending throughout childhood into young adulthood”.
Consideration for the basic human needs of children must be first and foremost for the 21st century. Children in home care are far superior in intelligence, social skills and behavioral patterning than their day care counterparts. Rethinking the metal model of child rearing is economical and categorically diminishes the rate of crime and antisocial youth behaviors.
Out of the Rubble of War Comes Light
There are successful infant school models in foreign countries that preserve the innocence and freedom of childhood. A model worth emulating and adopting is located in Italy. After World War II, there were casualties gone unnoticed by the media and press. Community and family ostracized hundreds of young girls impregnated by infiltrating soldiers. Literally out of the rubble of the war, these pregnant women built a community that has stood the test of time, struggle and personal pain. The greatest day care system in the world is housed in the Reggio Emilia Day Cares of Italy.
The Reggio schools house children from two to six in supporting, nurturing, caring, safe environments that produce work, art and products through a thematic approach unknown by children so young. These women have created the most remarkable system of education for the young. The Hundred Languages of Children, a demonstration of the effects of community schooling, tours the United States displaying the years of accumulated work of children.
FAILURES OF THE SYSTEM; DAY CARE
Begin with the history of Day Care and its evolution.
The evolution of the day care has perpetuated the notion that the ‘state’ has the knowledge and competence to assist in child development better than parents. How has this democracy progressed to politicians and corporations to define the ‘best interests of the child’? American culture does not value the parent’s presence in the home as an ongoing continuum for the child. Yet, a contributing factor to the roots of violent behaviors in teen males has been proven in the ‘failure to bond’ during early childhood. This bonding failure is exacerbated by separating a child from the safety and security of the home and parents too early in life to the threatening environment of the day care and large numbers of other young children. The ability of the child to adapt is not available to the child until a much later stage.
The myth prevails that socialization skills are best acquired in school. Rather, healthy tools for socialization are best developed from the example and modeling of parents, siblings and extended family- the source of love and security. From the earliest stages of life, youths are preprogrammed for social, emotional and physiological failure. Day Cares pose a great threat to the security of this country because separation anxiety develops at an early stage. Children are abandoned from their only source of safety and security, parent, at too young an age and left at the hands of children (because most preschools hire girls right out of high school) and well meaning adults who don’t have any knowledge about child development. The most critical times in a child’s life, from ages birth to six, when the formative patterns of life, security and health are established, are molded by strangers.
Day Cares are the breeding grounds for disease, immune deficiencies, emotional instability and damaged spirits. Children are expected to ‘share’ when this skill is reserved for a later stage of development. Sharing comes naturally when a child has a sense of identity and self, a sense of belonging and safety to spring from. Children miss fundamental stages of development and are later hampered in reading, math and everyday skills – like organization, cleanliness, communication- because there are just too many children to receive one-on-one attention. Hurried, sick, tired and frustrated, these infants and children develop psychological symptoms from the start. Biting, behavior problems, thumb sucking, bed wetting, rocking, all originate from the lack of a loving touch, compassion and sensitivity as only a parent can give. No amount of years or experiences will ever catch up with those early lost times of bonding, affection and love.
Day Cares are the breeding grounds for generations of problems yet to be imagined. Children who are angry, hostile, frustrated from the inability to communicate. Because some children acquire the ability to articulate earlier than other does not mean that they are able to express their feelings or thoughts accurately. What will it take to stop this obsession with giving the right to guide children to society? When will strangers stop caring for infants and toddlers?
DAY CARE TEACHERS
In most states, Day Cares teachers are not required to be licensed or trained in child development or any equivalent degree. The most crucial time of a child’s life, when the patterns of behavior are formulated, are guided by individuals who are paid minimum wage. Most day care teachers are untrained and unprepared for the emotional/ physical/ mental/ spiritual needs of young children one-on-one no less in large groups. The moral fiber and future of the country is directed by minimum wage labor (while CEO’s make multimillions).