Newsflash: Your Day-care Kiddy is an Ill-Mannered, Agressive Brat

More headlines from the world of "What everybody knows but won't say in polite company."

Largest US Child Study Finds Early Child Care Linked to Aggression and Disobedience

WASHINGTON, March 26, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Analysis of the largest, longest running, and most comprehensive study of child care in the United States has found that the more time children spent in center-based care before kindergarten, the more likely their teachers were to report such problem behaviors as "gets in many fights," "disobedient at school," and "argues a lot."

The study confirms research published last year which was undertaken in Canada which found that children in daycare were 17 times more hostile than children raised at home, and almost three times more anxious. The Canadian study also found negative effects on parents.

A 2005 study from England demonstrated that a mother's care was best for toddlers' development, with nursery care linked to "higher levels of aggression." An Australian study published in 2006 confirmed prior research finding that daycare seems to damage babies' brain chemistry and affect their "social and emotional development."

The current study, which appears in the March/April 2007 issue of Child Development, found that children with more experience in child care centers showed in early grades through sixth grade, a greater frequency of what the researchers termed teacher-reported externalizing problem behavior. Teachers reported more frequent problem behaviours such as: child demands a lot of attention; argues a lot; bragging and boasting; cruelty, bullying or meanness to others; destroys things belonging to others; disobedient at school; gets into many fights; lying or cheating; screams a lot.

Continuously, I get crap from people who assert (with a straight face) that children are better off in daycare. Everything from "socialization" i.e. not knowing for sure who their parents are, to "self-esteem" i.e. lack of an internal moral compass, and "enhanced immune system development" as if for 10,000 years human beings had parenting all wrong and then somehow in the 1980s the correct method of biological development was discovered: crowd 30 youngsters in a room with 3 stranger adults so that the immune system will properly develop to an optimal.

That daycare centers, like hospitals, are disease factories is hardly surprising. That the baby boomers and their brain dead Gen-X followers -on champion daycare like it was some sort of altruistic moral stand is even less surprising.