Thursday, August 19, 2010

Thursday's Thought


Childcare. It’s not a word; it’s a world. The subject of the world is child; the action of the world is care. As child and care seem to struggle against each other in a never ending series of problems, we need to ask if creating a childcare world in the daily absence of the parent can really work well?

Do we bring enough of a home environment into childcare and if not, without it, can we hope to give children a growing media that will take the place of home during away hours?

Parents are the single greatest assets of childcare – naturally. Why do professionals in the childcare world consistently resist bringing parents into the interior life of the childcare world, and is this a positive for the child?

I think it’s safe to say that without the parent, the child stands alone. Providers often cringe for the child whose parents never attend functions, are remarkably late nearly every day, and never remember anything going on at childcare.

Too often providers will agree the toll this takes on a child is irredeemable. Childcare professionals just can’t shore up the damage of non-responsive parents.

In response to uninvolved parents, some childcare professionals say that childcare can do it better than families. That’s an aberration. It’s also a fiction. Families are the primary foundation of children’s development – not childcare.

At best, childcare can only manage a safe and teaching haven for an at risk child during his hours at childcare, but it will never overshadow home because the home is the natural place for the child, and the child knows it.

These are the never-ending series of problems professionals face in childcare every day. Yet at the same time, caring involved professionals will ask, is the present state of childcare, what we have created for children, really good enough for the early childhood years?

Does the childcare we are providing really meet intellectual, spiritual, physical and emotional needs that positively mirror good family homes?

Considering the structure of today’s childcare, the answers are probably no simply because the structure of childcare does not use the home as a model, does not include parents, and at the heart, is not devoted to the child as an individual but part of a ratio that makes warehousing the blueprint.

The term “warehousing children” is offensive to most day care directors, but look at childcare from a numbers point of view and ask if that term justly identifies a childcare? Eighty, one hundred, two hundred, three hundred children under one roof does not bespeak the kind of individual care most parents want for their very young children.

What is the appropriate model for childcare outside the home? Perhaps it is a smaller more natural setting that includes the implements and environs of the home. Perhaps it is a place where parents feel welcome enough to be longer than drop off and pickup.

When there are no more questions left to be answered about appropriate and childcare, perhaps the childcare world will be a better place for those dear little ones we love most.

1 comment:

MC said...

What a thought provoking post! I hope you don't mind, I am planning to write down some of my own thoughts in reaction to this post on my blog (http://tinyfootprintskanata.wordpress.com - dreaming about starting a daycare). Thanks for writing this!