Dagvist, óþekkt og orðaforði

Niðurstöður úr viðamikilli rannsókn á áhrifum dagvistar á börn í Bandaríkjunum hafa vakið nokkuð mikla athygli.  Alla vegna hef ég fengið greinina "emailaða" til mín frá 3. mismunandi aðilum.

Í stuttu máli sagt eru niðurstöðurnar þær að dvöl barna á dagvistarstofnunum hafi skaðleg áhrif á hegðun þeirra.

Það kemur einnig fram í niðurstöðunum að börn sem hafa verið í dagvist hafi gjarna betri orðaforða en börn sem ekki hafa dvalið á slíkum stofnunum.

Það hefur reyndar vakið athygli mína að fjölmiðlar virðast sitt á hvað kjósa að hampa þessum niðurstöðum, en það er þó líklega ekki óeðlilegt, en stundum myndast þó sá grunur að það fari nokkuð eftir pólítískri afstöðu fjölmiðlanna hvoru er vakin meiri athygli á.

Þetta er óneitanlega athyglivert innlegg í umræður í þjóðfélögum sem leggja á meiri áherslu á dagvistir og æ stærri hópur barna eyðir á meiri tíma á dagvistarstofnunum.  "Vinnudagur" barnanna á dagvistarstofnunum enda gjarna lengri en vinnudagur foreldranna.

Ég myndi líka þyggja tengla ef einhver hefur upplýsingar um aðrar slíkar rannsóknir, ég tala nú ekki um ef einhverjar hafa farið fram á Íslandi.

En í frétt NYT má m.a. lesa eftirfarandi:

"A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade.

The effect was slight, and well within the normal range for healthy children, the researchers found. And as expected, parents’ guidance and their genes had by far the strongest influence on how children behaved.

But the finding held up regardless of the child’s sex or family income, and regardless of the quality of the day care center. With more than two million American preschoolers attending day care, the increased disruptiveness very likely contributes to the load on teachers who must manage large classrooms, the authors argue.

On the positive side, they also found that time spent in high-quality day care centers was correlated with higher vocabulary scores through elementary school."

"The findings are certain to feed a long-running debate over day care, experts say.

“I have accused the study authors of doing everything they could to make this negative finding go away, but they couldn’t do it,” said Sharon Landesman Ramey, director of the Georgetown University Center on Health and Education. “They knew this would be disturbing news for parents, but at some point, if that’s what you’re finding, then you have to report it.”

The debate reached a high pitch in the late 1980s, during the so-called day care wars, when social scientists questioned whether it was better for mothers to work or stay home. Day care workers and their clients, mostly working parents, argued that it was the quality of the care that mattered, not the setting. But the new report affirms similar results from several smaller studies in the past decade suggesting that setting does matter.

“This study makes it clear that it is not just quality that matters,” said Jay Belsky, one of the study’s principal authors, who helped set off the debate in 1986 with a paper suggesting that nonparental child care could cause developmental problems. Dr. Belsky was then at Pennsylvania State University and has since moved to the University of London.

That the troublesome behaviors lasted through at least sixth grade, he said, should raise a broader question: “So what happens in classrooms, schools, playgrounds and communities when more and more children, at younger and younger ages, spend more and more time in centers, many that are indisputably of limited quality?”"

Fréttina má finna hér.  Heimasíðu rannsóknarinnar hér.

Athugasemdir

[Elías Theódórsson, 27.3.2007 kl. 18:22]

Kemur mér ekkert á óvart. Það er sorglegt að foreldrar á íslandi skuli ekki hafa raunverulegt val varðandi uppeldi barna sinna. Áróðurinn er og hefur verið að senda börn á uppeldisstofnanir sem eru mikið niðurgreiddar af skattfé annars verði þau félagslega skert og nái lakari árangri í grunnskóla sem er fáráðlegt.  Það er einungis á færi efnameira fólks að leyfa sér að ala upp sín börn sjálf. Það er kominn tími til að vinna heimavinnandi foreldris sér virt.