As I’ve written several times, cradle-to-school childcare is surely the most staggering feat of social engineering a populace was ever gaslit into. Even the communists had to force parents to hand their babies over to state-run creches and stagger back to the fields and factories to become Productive Economic Units. We in the ‘free’ West did it voluntarily.
Has it been worth it? The industry and government will tell you it’s all sunshine and rainbows and ‘emotional resilience’, but the evidence strongly suggests otherwise.
A very large Canadian study found that by four and a half, many hours in daycare predicted negative outcomes in social competence, externalizing problems, and adult-child conflict. The children who spent many hours in daycare each week generally had these problems three times more often than children who did not attend daycare. The children who attended daycare also had higher levels of anxiety, hyperactivity, and aggression than their siblings who had not attended daycare. And differences were found in the mothers as well. Those mothers who sent their children to daycare for many hours each week were found to be less sensitive to their children’s needs.
Moreover, in a different study, while children were actually at daycare, they were found to have higher levels of the stress hormone, cortisol in their bodies, than when they were at home.
Other research finds that the touted improvements in educational outcomes are also illusory. The economic benefits for parents seem just as illusory, given the frequent complaints from mothers that ‘I only work to pay for the childcare’.
So, how did generations of parents – mostly mothers – get persuaded that life as a cubicle drone in a soulless corporation is a worthwhile trade for the incomparable joy of being there for your kids’ first five years? As the Australian Psychological Association says, “It’s true a parent in unpaid care work isn’t generating cold hard cash in the short term, but what about the long-term social, health and human capital they generate?”
Well, teachers might have some ideas.
A 2023 Senate inquiry into classroom behaviour in December 2023 found that, on average, Australian teachers spent 15 per cent of class time managing student behaviour instead of actually teaching.
A teacher with nearly 50 years experience told the inquiry: “Classroom behaviour has only grown worse in recent years … my worst-behaved classes are now worse than anything I saw decades ago.”
Another said: “Staff have been hit, staff have had furniture thrown at them; staff have had the windows next to their heads punched in.”
Even the mildest attempts at discipline can easily be career-ending.
Imagine being reported to the police for doing your job because a 10-year-old didn’t like being told off.
That’s what happened to one year five teacher I know. She asked a boy to put a ball he had been playing with back in the shed. He hurled it across the oval instead.
When she said she would give him a notification (students get detention after a certain number of notifications), he refused, calling her a “stupid wog”.
Then he went home and told his parents she’d assaulted him. Grabbed his collar, pulled him backwards and threw him to the ground. They, in turn, believed every word and, without even getting her side of the story, reported the teacher to the police […]
The only thing that saved her career was CCTV footage. It proved she hadn’t laid a finger on the boy.
Despite a clear case of making a false accusation to police, itself a crime, the boy never faced a single consequence. Not so much as an apology from either him or his parents.
So, who’s to blame?
Is this the result of lax parenting? Millennials, after all, introduced gentle parenting, where discipline is a distant dream. Or is it the impact of social media where kids are exposed to so much unfiltered content, with slurs, abuse and shock behaviour rewarded with likes?
Or is it the fallout from Covid, where months of missed kindergarten left a generation without routine, social skills and the simple ability to sit down and listen? Or all three?
Oddly, despite the research showing that childcare results in higher levels of anxiety, hyperactivity and aggression, there’s no mention of the multi-billion-dollar industry, which the Albanese Labor government wants to make universal, as a possible culprit. Talk about Don’t Mention the War.
And so the gaslighting continues.
