From the Montreal Gazette on the NDP daycare funding announcement: (broken link)
Layton also said daycare would offer support for children at key moments and serve as a preventive measure against violence.
“Good child care (and) after school programs give our children the help that they need, identify the problems that they face, so that they can make choices that don’t lead them down the wrong path, for example violence in the school yard,” Layton said.
As I write I am breastfeeding my peaceful baby.
The Montreal Gazette reports the NDP’s Jack Layton saying that daycare centre care will reduce violence, clearly implying that parental care leads to violent kids.
Layton’s sentiments echo the outrageous 2006 statement by Liberal MP Carolyn Kennedy: that we will need to build more prisons if we don’t build more daycare centres.
This flies in the face of the mounting evidence:
- More time spent in daycare centres leads to more children having higher levels of behaviour problems – including “cruelty”. The extremely rigorous child care study by the NICHD in the US found that this negative behaviour continues at least until grade 6 and happens regardless of the quality of the care.
- A peer reviewed study of Quebec daycare (by economists Drs. Milligan, Baker, and Gruber) using Statistics Canada data found significantly more child behavioural problems reported in Quebec compared to other provinces after the $5-a-day program started.
- After over 30 years of near-universal institutional child care in Sweden, domestic violence against women is increasing, contrary to the goal of greater “gender equity” according to a leading Swedish feminist (CBC link (broken link) – Scroll down to part 3 to read about the situation in Sweden. You can listen to the audio too).
- Peer reviewed research (broken link) finds children’s stress (cortisol) levels increase with time in daycare centre.
- In recent years France has repeatedly erupted in mass rioting and youth violence despite years of massive daycare/preschool programming.
Layton’s statement is profoundly insulting to the parents of the 90% of children 0-12 not in daycare centres.
This is even worse than last week’s insult. Last Friday, Layton’s press secretary, Ian Capstick, retorted, “That’s poppycock and you know it!” when I said, “every mother is a working mother.” He twice claimed that it was “just semantics” when I said the definition of child care must include parental child care.
Helen Ward,
President
Kids First Parent Association of Canada
http://www.kidsfirstcanada.org
604-291-0088
kidsfirstcanada.org 