1000 days

One thousand days. That’s roughly how long it takes for a newborn baby, muling and puking in his mother’s arms, to be miraculously transformed into a walking, talking little boy, bursting to break out of domesticity and into the wider world. If all’s gone well in those thousand days, he’ll have moved far beyond his native Stone Age heritage.

He’ll have a growing understanding not only of the natural world and the fundamentals of human nature but also of his own technological age, and he’ll have more than 500 words to help him to learn more and tell excitedly about his findings. But it depends — particularly in the first 18 months — on personal care. In a society obsessed with systemised solutions, we’ve forgotten the significance of love in raising happy, balanced children. It’s led us to accept practices which — in a healthy, wealthy society, after more than 50 years of peace and prosperity — are frankly shameful.

Sue Palmer in the Times today writes on Why nursery schools are bad for little boys. I enjoyed this article, which makes some telling and empathetic observations about the difficulties of parenting in this 'modern' age.
It suprises me though that some of these comments need to be made at all in a broadsheet. Surely a child could tell us most of this. Why are we so slow to see it?

The British economy has now adjusted to women’s independence and the cost of living has gone up to take account of their earnings. Taking several years off the career ladder and/or losing several years’ pay is a luxury many mothers no longer feel they can afford. In the space of a couple of decades, a huge daycare industry has grown up to fill the childcare gap. And much of that industry consists of institutional care.

There is a world of difference between personal loving attention in a familiar domestic environment and the sort of care that can be provided by a day nursery for children under 3. Unless staff ratios are extremely high, there’s little chance of much one-on-one attention and no one is likely to be as attuned to a particular infant’s wavelength as his or her own dedicated carer.

in the UK where many private nurseries are run on a shoestring, staff are often low-paid and poorly qualified, and there may be a worryingly high turnover. To ensure a baseline of “good practice”, the Government has introduced a legal framework of accountability procedures, which means that nursery workers are kept busy with bureaucracy and box-ticking. This eats into the time available for personal interaction with the children and lowers morale, leading to more staff absences and problems with turnover.

scores on school tests are not the only measure of wellbeing in early childhood. Indeed, focusing on the academic at this stage seems rather to miss the point: long-term academic success, like long-term emotional resilience and social competence, is rooted in a young child’s sense that he is loved and secure.

Child-rearing wisdom has traditionally been handed down through the female line, and cross-generational contacts between both genders are desperately needed in the 21st century. In a fragmented modern world, it’s difficult for young parents to make informal, non-professional contacts with other mothers and surrogate grandparents — but it shouldn’t be beyond the combined power of the web and local children’s services to match people of similar profiles who’d have a good chance of hitting it off and forging long-term relationships.

If boys are to receive the high-quality personal attention they need at the start of their lives, we have to find 21stcentury ways of tipping the domestic balance away from systems and institutions and back to personal interaction and parental collaboration. Because without the love, learning and language that comes from personal care, boys are more likely than girls to grow “colder, sadder, more stressed and more aggressive” with every passing year.

In her call for local organisations to be actively involved in 'making personal interaction and parental collaboration' available she speaks of the involvement of a wider network of family and friends, and against the fragmentation of our society. Good for her - even if she seems to only have a pragmatic basis for this.

But what about the role of a local church?

You must teach what is in accord with sound doctrine. 2 Teach the older men to be temperate, worthy of respect, self-controlled, and sound in faith, in love and in endurance. 3 Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. 4 Then they can train the younger women to love their husbands and children, 5 to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no-one will malign the word of God. 6 Similarly, encourage the young men to be self-controlled. (Titus 2:1-6)