Tag Archives: Daycare

News

Democrats want government social workers to visit children starting “at birth”

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This is from CNS News.

Excerpt:

Will America be a better and freer country three decades from now if the children who turn four in this decade spend most of their waking hours with members of a government teachers union rather than with their moms?

President Barack Obama’s vision of America, not surprisingly, starts with very young children spending their time in the custody of government employees.

“I believe we should start teaching our kids at the earliest ages,” Obama said last week.

When he used the word “we” here, Obama was not talking about Michelle and himself, he was talking about the government. When he used the words “our kids,” he was not talking about his own children — who attend the most expensive private school in Washington, D.C. — he was talking about other people’s children and grandchildren.

[…]Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius explained at the National Press Club last April — at a lectern shared with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten — that Obama’s vision for federal involvement in the lives of very young children does not stop with 4-year-olds.

Obama’s budget calls for HHS to spend $15 billion over 10 years to fund an Obamacare provision called the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program. An HHS budget document says this program will send government-funded “nurses, social workers, and other professionals” into people’s homes to “improve parenting skills.”

“I think that there still needs to be great understanding of what the president has put on the table is really a birth-to-five proposal, recognizing that you can’t start at 4-year-olds,” Sebelius said at the National Press Club.

“We really need to start at birth,” said Sebelius. “So, there will be an enhancement of home-visiting, which we know is an evidence-based strategy that helps people be good parents from the onset, helps the first and best teacher a child will ever have learn important skills.

[…]Obama, and his allies in government, advocate policies that violate the natural law and destroy human lives. They advocate, for example, the deliberate killing of innocent human lives through abortion (and, in Obama’s case, through intentionally neglecting-to-death born children who have survived abortions). They advocate destroying the family by redefining it to include, so far, carnal relationships between people of the same sex — thus denying that children have a God-given right to a mother and father.

Sebelius has been Obama’s chief agent in attacking the First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion. At this very moment, she is fighting in federal court to force Catholic schools in Washington, D.C., to secure health coverage for their faculty and staff that would provide abortion-inducing drugs in direct and unambiguous violation not only of the inalterable teachings of the Catholic Church but also in direct and unambiguous violation of the inalienable God-given right to life expressly recognized in the founding document of this nation.

For each of the last five years, according to the CDC, at least 40 percent of the babies born in the United States were born to unmarried mothers. As recently as 1980, it was only 18.4 percent.

Obama’s vision of a government that “educates” babies aims at forming the characters of the tragically increasing number of children born illegitimately in the United States — and as many other children as his programs can reach.

His strategic aim is to make them allies in his cause.

I don’t think that strangers in government can do as good of a job as my future wife and I can do. And I don’t like having to pay them to try. Big government secularists seem to have a deep suspicion of parents, and they seem to want to get the children away from them as quickly as possible, especially the fathers. Fathers are bad, I guess, because we teach children about God and about morality, and we teach them to be practical and independent. These are things that a secular leftist government does not like. But they do like to take money from fathers. And mothers too, if they can get it. None of this taking of money and then using it to influence your children is voluntary either. The whole idea that government will be interfering with my family, should I choose to start one, is really upsetting to me. Why don’t they raise their families with their own money, and leave me to raise mine with my money? What gives them the right to push their views on my children, paid for with my salary?

News

New study: three or more hours of TV per day harms children’s development

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From the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Toddlers who watch three hours of TV a day may end up educationally stunted, physically weak and prone to bullying, a study has revealed.

Researchers have found that after two hours of viewing, every extra hour of TV has the potential to harm a child’s development, both physically and socially.

This includes poorer vocabulary, maths skills and attention in class, victimisation by classmates and poor physical prowess at nursery.

The study looked at 1,997 boys and girls aged 29 months whose parents reported their television viewing behaviour as part of the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development.

The researchers found that if a child watched up to two hours and 52 minutes of TV, they were unlikely to suffer any negative effects.

[…]The study was published in the journal Paediatric Research.

I actually made the decision to give up TV about 8 years back and stick with my computer and a high speed connection instead. One of my reasons was to avoid handing money to the people who create TV programs, because those people do not agree with my values in the vast majority of cases. Why would I give them money to present their worldview to me, when I cannot get a hearing from them?

Life Site News explains the problem.

Excerpt:

Ipsos MediaCT, a global market research company, have just released a study…

According to the report, 18 percent of Americans between the ages of 13 and 64 said that television has directly contributed to their increasing support for same-sex “marriage.”

That’s nearly double the number (10 percent) who reported television had increased their opposition to marriage redefinition.

“Based on this data, I think we can conclude that TV has, at least in part, moved the needle of public opinion to see same-sex marriage in a positive way,” Ben Spergel, Senior Vice President and Head of TV Insights at Ipsos MediaCT said in a statement.

“With everything from higher profile portrayals of gay characters, to celebrity support of gay marriage, to last year’s groundbreaking endorsement by President Obama, we are seeing a shift in our culture that is being influenced by popular culture,” he said.

Last month, liberal writer Andrew O’Hehir wrote an article for Salon crediting the American movement toward homosexual acceptance to television shows like “Will and Grace,””Roseanne,” “The Real World,” “Ellen DeGeneres,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Modern Family,” and “Glee.”

“From ‘Soap’ to Ellen DeGeneres to Richard Hatch on ‘Survivor’ to the macho male couple who won season 4 of ‘The Amazing Race,’” O’Hehir wrote, “televisual images of sexual diversity have gradually moved away from victimology and ‘gay best friend’ stereotypes toward a ‘normalizing vision’of LGBT culture.”

“While the startling public shift on gay marriage – something few people of my generation, straight or gay, thought they’d ever see — is not solely the product of TV, it represents the ultimate fulfillment of TV’s vision of sexual equality,” O’Hehir added.

Support for same-sex “marriage” is on the rise in the United States. Recent polls show more than half of Americans support redefining marriage to include homosexual couples, and several states now allow gay nuptials in defiance of federal law.

So that’s one reason. Why would I voluntarily give money to people who are working against what I believe?

Secondly, I particularly don’t like the “passive” feel of television. If I liked mysteries, I would rather solve one than watch one being solved. If I liked sports, I’d rather play sports or play a video game with a friend of sports, than watch millionaires play sports. If I liked military history, I’d rather play a military simulation than watch a documentary. I think that I learn a lot more by doing than by seeing.

Polemics

New study: parents who work nightshifts or weekends damage their children

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The UK Telegraph reports on a new study.

Excerpt:

The 24/7 economy is damaging children, a study has concluded, with youngsters more likely to suffer developmental and behavioural problems if their parents work unsociable hours.

Children of parents who work nightshift and weekends were found to have poorer language, reading and mathematics skills and were more likely to be overweight or obese.

By adolescence, they were also more likely to be depressed and to have abuse drugs and alcohol.

The comprehensive review, led by Jianghong Li, a senior researcher from WZB Berlin Social Science Center, looked back at 30 years of research comparing parents’ work schedules with their children’s development.

21 out of 23 reviewed studies showed weekend and nightshifts damaged child development.

Authors found that working unsociable hours: “has negative consequences for the developing child with regards to mental health and behavioural problems, cognitive development, being overweight and obesity.”

The impact was worse for pre-school children who were up to 35 per cent more likely to have developmental problems.

Why would parents have to work so much? Well, it might be materialism and consumerism. But it might also be caused by policies of the secular left, like high tax rates, the marriage penalty, etc. The secular left is very much against marriage and they do not like the idea that a man will be able to provide for a family and keep his wife home to raise them when they are very young.

It’s not just nightshift and weekend shifts, either. Previously, I wrote about another Oxford University study on daycare that was featured in the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Academics at Oxford University discovered that exposure to some forms of early education contributed to bad behaviour and could be linked to emotional problems.

The study, based on an analysis of infants from almost 1,000 families, showed that the strongest influence on children came from within the home itself.

Children raised in poor families with high levels of parental stress or mental health problems were most at risk of developing emotional problems by the time they started school, it emerged.

The research also uncovered trends relating to children who were in formal child care — away from their parents.

[…]The report, published in the journal Child: Care, Health and Development, said that “children who spent more time in group care, mainly nursery care, were more likely to have behavioural problems, particularly hyperactivity”.

The study, led by Prof Alan Stein, of Oxford’s Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, found that “spending more time in day care centres, over the total period was a predictor of total problem scores”.

“Children who spent more time in day care centres were more likely to be hyperactive,” it said. “Children receiving more care by childminders were more likely to have peer problems.”

The authors added: “The findings in relation to childminding suggest that it might be out of home care rather than group care that raises the risk of behavioural difficulties.”

[…]The study said: “These findings suggest that interventions to enhance children’s emotional and behavioural development might best focus on supporting families and augmenting the quality of care in the home.”

My point in posting these studies is to show that what what children really need in order to do well are their parents. They need time from their parents to talk to them and do activities with them. They need input and guidance from their parents. Any time you here left-wing feminist politicians talking about how we need to push to have children, especially very young children, educated by experts, you need to keep in mind that they don’t have the facts to back up their idea. People who push these plans push them because they want women to behave like men and work outside the home. They also want to boost tax revenues by making bother parents work more.

Everyone knows that parents who are careful about who they marry and careful about staying married will have more successful children than those who don’t marry before having kids, or who don’t prepare for marriage themselves, or who don’t marry someone with the skills to do their roles in the marriage. But people on the left want to reverse that – they want everyone’s children to be “equal” regardless of what decisions the parents make. And they want to do this by redistributing wealth (not character) from parents who succeed to parents who fail. So when you hear this “equality” crowd talking about the need to replace incompetent parents with taxpayer-funded government bureaucrats, you need to keep studies like the ones above in mind.

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