I remember how it was -- JR
Sending little kids to childcare is not good for them
Judith Sloan mentions a number of considerations below but fails to mention that most children in childcare have much higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol -- compared with their levels at home. Chidcare is DEMONSTRABLY bad for chidren. You can see it at the physical level. Organizational childcare stresses and worries the little kids. They feel afraid, not secure. It destroys their confidence in their environment. And it sometimes has lasting bad effects. See, for instance:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23772818/
Children develop best in a loving home. It has to be a really bad home for childcare centers to be beneficialI have a confession to make: I never sent my children to childcare. They did go to kinder/preschool when there were four for a few days each week during the school term, but that was it. Sorry, kids.
Actually, I’m not sorry. While I was at work, they were happy at home being looked after by the same loving nanny we were lucky to have. Even to this day, I’m not convinced of the benefits of centre-based childcare, particularly for very young children.
I get it; a lot of parents have no choice but to place their kids in childcare centres for financial reasons. It’s only by going down this path that the generous taxpayer-funded subsidies are available. Notwithstanding the restricted hours these centres operate, they do provide potentially more reliable care than (expensive) nannies or relatives during the core working hours.
I also get why many parents want to believe that centre-based childcare, including the incorporated preschool programs, offers their children a range of benefits such as socialising with other children and play-based learning (whatever that is). Less mention is made of the frequent bouts of infectious diseases that children pick up at these centres and the rapid-fire phone calls from management to collect the children within five minutes.
It has got to the point where parents are brainwashed into believing that it is their civic duty to plonk their very young child in a childcare centre as soon as possible after birth and return to the workforce in order to boost the economy and pay taxes. Throw in a bit of self-actualisation and is there really any choice?
Mind you, the busybody feminists whose aim in life is to have every woman working full-time, pre- and post-partum, remain frustrated that so many young mother apparently are happy to work part-time while their children are young.
To be sure, many more women with children now participate in the workforce than was once the case. In 1991, just under 60 per cent of women with children under the age of 15 worked; by 2020, this proportion had climbed to nearly 75 per cent. But the majority of mothers with young children (4 and under) opt to work part-time.
These same activist feminists, who have generally had dream runs in the workforce ending in cushy corporate board positions, argue that it is the way that childcare fee subsidies work that explains the dominance of part-time work among new mothers. Those extra days of work are simply not worth it. It doesn’t occur to these campaigners that most mothers actually prefer to spend as much time as possible with their babies and toddlers because this is good for the children and for them.
This relentless advocacy has all the hallmarks of the old Soviet model of child-rearing. Women were forced to leave their very young children (cared for by women workers) in order to undertake full-time jobs to support the communist state. The idea that mothers would be given any choice was of course anathema to the autocratic rulers – they must be made to work for the state.
The early model of the kibbutz in Israel also involved communal child-rearing in which some women would be assigned the role of looking after all the children while the other women undertook the various other tasks at hand. In some instances, parents wouldn’t see their children all week. Unsurprisingly, this feature of the kibbutz ultimately didn’t survive as parents expressed their desire to be fully involved in bringing up their own children.
So let’s go back to current day Australia and examine the articles of faith to which the Labor party (and to some extent, the Liberal party) adhere. They are: centre-based childcare is good; it must be heavily subsidised by taxpayers, with the most generous assistance being directed to those on the lowest incomes; renaming it early childhood education and asserting that it is beneficial for children, both in the present and the future, provides the basis for even more generous subsidisation, even ‘free’ childcare.
In Labor’s case, you can throw in the potential for the unionisation of childcare workers and the scope for generous pay rises based on either arbitration or enterprise bargaining. Let’s face it, there’s no hope of getting nannies into the union and mothers staying at home are no good either.
One of the most astonishing aspects of the debate about childcare and the role of government is the relative absence of research on the impact on the children. There is a very old study – the Perry study from the US – that is often quoted to support the benefits of structured, free-of-charge childcare. But the numbers in the study were tiny and the parents selected for the study came from extremely disadvantaged backgrounds. (Some of the fathers were in jail.)
It is hardly surprising that those children who attended childcare compared with the control group did better on a number of measures, including behaviour, progress at school, staying out of jail and the like. But there was never any scope to generalise the findings because they were mainly driven by the socioeconomic backgrounds of the treatment and control groups.
A more recent study and quoted by Rod Liddle in this magazine relates to childcare in Quebec. The provincial government decided many years ago to provide close-to-free childcare; the rest of Canada did not follow suit. According to Liddle, ‘studies showed a significant development decrease in Quebec children relative to those in the rest of Canada’. He quotes some alarming figure in relation to ‘social competence, external problems and adult-child conflict.’
Perhaps the most worrying finding is that the negative effects of childcare appear to be long-lived. ‘By age 15, extensive hours before age four-and-a-half [in childcare] predicted problem behaviours… even after controlling for daycare quality, socioeconomic background and parenting quality.’
In the case of Australia, we are only too aware of declining school student performance over the past decade and a half, coinciding with a period of rising participation in centre-based childcare. Of course, this correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation but it’s not a great start for the advocates of further government subsidisation of childcare.
A final word of warning: when you read about the benefits of early childhood education in Australia, a lot of conflating goes on. Centre-based childcare for very young children is not early childhood education and a few days per week of preschool for three- and four-year-olds is not full-time childcare.
Keep these differences in mind when assessing the self-interested demands being made by the various lobbyists.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/but-what-about-the-children/ ?
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UK: Single-sex schools will be able to reject transgender pupils and teachers can refuse to call children by their preferred pronouns under new Government guidelines
Single-sex schools will be able to reject transgender pupils under new government guidelines.
The move comes after school leaders and governors met with lawyers amid fears about discrimination claims from parents of transgender pupils if they refused to accommodate them.
The guidance, which will apply to all state and independent single-sex schools in England and be issued in weeks, is being drawn up by Education Secretary Gillian Keegan and equalities minister Kemi Badenoch.
Under it, school leaders will also be able to refuse demands by pupils to use different pronouns. A Department for Education source said: 'Single-sex schools can refuse to admit pupils of the other legal sex regardless of whether the child is questioning their gender.'
The document will also set out that children who change their gender identity cannot share changing or shower facilities with the opposite sex.
The guidance is intended to clarify how schools should respond to children with gender dysphoria and comes after a dramatic increase in the number of children who claim they are trans.
A leader of a girls' school in London told the Telegraph: 'There's anxiety around litigious parents. Most schools say they will be supportive but there are grey areas the Department for Education needs to clarify.'
It comes after Mrs Keegan insisted teachers should be able to say 'good morning, girls' at a single-sex school.
Urging schools to take 'a big dose of common sense' when navigating trans issues, she said: 'We need to look after the wellbeing of all pupils. In that case, the wellbeing of girls is also very important and 'good morning, girls' is absolutely fine to say in a girls' school to a girls' class.'
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Indiana Public School Officials Admit Lying to Parents About Critical Race Theory
Tony Kinnett
When I received an email from Nathalie Henderson, chief schools officer of Indianapolis Public Schools, demanding that I and other administrators lie to our parents and teachers about teaching critical race theory, I was amazed at the boldness in her request that I be dishonest.
At the time, I was the science coordinator for Indianapolis Public Schools.
Henderson instructed us, as fellow school system administrators, to tell parents that we weren’t teaching critical race theory, but just a form of “racial equity.”
By dodging parents’ questions and misleading them with alternative terms deemed not upsetting, we were sheltering our inboxes from the disgust of parents, whose approval we didn’t concern ourselves with.
After a virtual meeting with critical race theory scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings in which I watched my colleagues laugh about teaching critical race theory and how proud they were of it, I decided that I’d had enough.
The next morning, Nov. 4, 2021, I recorded and tweeted a video explaining exactly how Indianapolis Public Schools teaches critical race theory, cited my sources, and warned parents to “keep looking” whenever a public school administrator brushed off their concerns.
I was called a liar by Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project. I was banned from entering any property of Indianapolis Public Schools for fear that I might “psychologically traumatize” fellow staff. And I eventually was fired by the school system.
I was told that I was imagining things, that critical race theory was taught only in graduate schools, and that school system administrators weren’t lying to parents.
Now many of those administrators, who I was assured never would lie to parents about what schools were teaching, have been exposed while admitting that they constantly mislead parents about what’s being taught in the classroom.
A recent hidden-camera investigation by Accuracy in Media, on which the organization reported Wednesday, revealed that principals and superintendents in Indiana knowingly and regularly obstruct curricular and pedagogical transparency by misleading parents with different terms for critical race theory and social and emotional learning so that parents won’t get upset.
Brad Sheppard, an assistant superintendent at Elkhart (Indiana) Community Schools, told the investigators: “We just have to avoid the words, you know? The labels.”
Social and emotional learning, Sheppard said, “has become a bad phrase and we don’t openly use that phrase but we’re still doing it, so… I mean, just to avoid anything, I mean, we have not really been hit with it, but just to even avoid it.”
Critical race theory is a societal view stating that the cause of every historical event, the foundation of every system, and each facet of U.S. life is built upon white supremacy. Social and emotional learning is a style of education that encourages children to analyze and manipulate emotional responses based on a set of fluid values, often reflective of education philosopher John Dewey’s “Humanist Manifesto.”
Due to events such as the Indianapolis Public Schools’ exposure by Accuracy in Media, parents are now aware that school districts rebrand principles of critical race theory as “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” So other school districts also have begun avoiding labeling anything as DEI.
Tracey Noe, assistant superintendent of curriculum, instruction, and assessment for Indiana’s Goshen Community Schools, told Accuracy in Media’s investigators that administrators had renamed their “Equity and Inclusion Committee” a “work group,” explaining that “we just didn’t want to make a target of it.”
It’s not hard to imagine why school district administrators who adhere to critical race theory and certain social and emotional learning styles are trying to hide these curricula and practices from parents: The content is very unpopular with parents.
Since Accuracy in Media published its video, Elkhart Community Schools’ Sheppard and Goshen Community Schools’ Noe have been placed on leave, pending an investigation.
The Goshen school district claims that Noe “misrepresented the district” with her statements. The Elkhart district hasn’t stated why it placed Sheppard on leave, but called on Accuracy in Media to release the entire video, sans editing, “in order for the full context to be understood.”
Penn High School, near South Bend, Indiana, was caught giving teachers a social and emotional learning lesson on “Racism and Anti-Racism” in early 2021, according to documents unearthed by Parents Defending Education. The lesson equated supporting former President Donald Trump, saying “MAGA,” and calling for detention of illegal immigrants with “Calls for Violence” and “Genocide.”
Northview Middle School, in Washington Township in Indianapolis, informed a woman that her son could not join an engineering program because he was “not a minority.” After some backlash, the school’s principal reluctantly informed the mother that her son could apply for the program (but did so after the application deadline had passed).
Parental dissatisfaction with diversity, equity, and inclusion programs led to the sweep of “pro-parent” school board candidates in 2022 at Hamilton Southeastern Schools in Fishers, Indiana.
The election results followed a series of scandals in which Hamilton Southeastern Schools planned to punish students for “microaggressions,” spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on social and emotional learning surveys, and required teachers to participate in disturbingly discriminatory racial equity training sessions.
As additional public school districts—not just in Indiana, but across the United States—continue to be exposed for their strange fascination with critical race theory and other progressive education methods, I encourage parents to continue looking. Don’t take administrators’ word for it.
Every secret recording, email, document, assignment, training, and policy reinforces what parents have discovered post-COVID-19: Many administrators think they know better than parents and will ignore, obfuscate, and tell outright lies to continue their work.
My message remains the same since November 2021. When officials tell you critical race theory isn’t taught in our schools, they’re lying. Keep looking.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/17/indiana-school-officials-lie-to-parents-about-crt
******************************************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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