Grandparents vs. Nurseries
I shouldn’t watch the BBC Breakfast news. It sends me into full on rant mode for the rest of the day.
So someone, somewhere, thought there was a need to compare childcare provided by grandparents to that provided by nurseries. I can only assume they will shortly be covering Apples vs. Oranges.
Just in case working parents weren’t feeling guilty enough about leaving their child in favour of money (and possibly sanity) we’re now being told that the people who raised us aren’t a good enough childcare provider.
The survey (for which I can find no online links, but I promise it’s true, I saw it on the television…) suggests that children aged three who’d been in grandparental care since they were nine months had more behavioural problems than those who’d been in nursery. It was also said that the nursery kids had better recognition of shapes and colours.
It was suggested by the people discussing this survey that the behavioural problems were probably to do with socialisation (as in, when they dumped the grandparent’s wards in a nursery, they didn’t cope with it as well as the ones who’d been there for two years) and the fact that grandparents like to spoil their grandchildren.
The bit that got skimmed over for the sake of drama was that children cared for by their grandparents had better skills in listening, speaking and understanding.
So as far as I can tell, this survey thinks that the most important skills for a 3-year-old go in this order:
- Behaviour
- Recognising shapes and colours
- Listening, speaking and understanding
What utter bollocks. It is my educated and informed opinion (educated by my 3-year-old and informed by common sense) that someone, somewhere, will produce a study saying that Grandparents are better than Nurseries because the children learn the more important skills of listening, speaking and understanding.
And it’s my uninformed guess,used to make a point, that this next survey will come from somewhere like Italy or Spain or even France. A sensible country that doesn’t expect their kids to be able to pass their GCSEs by the time they’re five.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 8:17 am and is tagged childcare, opinions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
9:51 pm on February 19th, 2009
Great post, I stopped listening to any research about childcare for the same reasons as you, can do without the guilt and know that in a few months there’ll be a new report, completing contradicting this one.
What’s really irritating about this particular research is that if grand-parents stopped supporting their children with childcare, this country would be on its knees. Ridiculous. I have no doubt that the research was undertaken by the Association for Nurseries or some other such organisation. Next week, there’ll be one commissioned by the childminders association, comparing childminders to nurseries.. hang on, think that one’s already been done. groan.
We can only do our best as working mums and life is hard enough without society piling even more guilt onto us. Pah.