The Need for Quality Daycare

The Need for Quality Daycare Daycare has become a controversy because of the great quantity of advantages and disadvantages that it involves. While a very large number of parents have to rely on child care centers because of career ambitions or financial needs that only their jobs can fulfill, most child psychiatrists believe that the ideal growing environment for an infant is at home with the family. The problem is that choosing the right caregiver, a good substitute for the parents, is very hard, and the consequences of a wrong decision can be very detrimental to the child’s personality development. This choice depends on many factors like culture, education and especially income. In fact, the financial availability plays the most important role in the possibility to choose the child care with the highest quality, which means, the lowest danger of a negative impact on the infant. In March 1970, twenty-six percent of mothers with children under two years of age were in the labor force. By the same month in 1984, that figure was 46.8 percent (U.S. Department of Labor, 1984). In the present day, that number is even higher and the children under five years of age who need daycare assistance reached ten million (Bureau of Census, 1995). This strong increase of demand for external caregivers brought to the creation of many specialized centers and the growth of the sector of non-professional assistance like part-time babysitters. Unfortunately, the most part of these offerings are incompetent and low quality. As the average age in which children are placed in extra-parental hands is decreasing, the risk of later behavioral consequences increases, so the choice of the right solution becomes always more critical. At this time, over ha... ... middle of paper ... ... Bibliography: Works Cited “A Boost for Day Care.” Newsweek 134.18 (Nov. 1999): 76. Chilman, Catherine S. “Parental employment and child care trends: Some critical issues and suggested policies.” Social Work 38.4 (Jul. 1993): 451-61. Chisolm, P., and Jenish, D. “Kids, Careers and the Day Care Debate.” Maclean’s 106.22 (May 1993): 36-40. Leavitt, Robin L., and Bauman Power, Martha. “Emotional Socialization in the Postmodern Era.” Social Psychology Quarterly 52.1 (Mar. 1989): 35-43. National Academy Press. “Child Care for Low Income Families, Summary of Two Workshops.” 1995. 8 May 2000 . Van Ijzendoorn, Marinus H., et al. “Attunement between parents and professional caregivers: A comparison of childrearing attitudes in different child-care settings.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 60.3 (Aug 1998): 771-81.