Child care is a supervision of a child or multiple children by an institution or people other than the parents or parental guardians of the child. While addressing the question, it is essential to analyze how the distance between a parent and a child affects the latter. However, childcare is not the only topic that concerns the majority of parents. Choosing whether the child should get an education at a teacher-directed preschool or a child-centered preschool is not easy; however, it is crucial to understand how they operate before making a decision.
Children manage to develop rapidly during their first three years of life, and not only physically. There is a tremendous difference between an infant and a three-year-old child and their response to the social environment. I happen to know one of my acquaintances who uses daycare services regularly. Louise is a working parent of three, with a demanding and exhausting job. Her youngest is about one year old, and because she wants to provide for her family financially, she frequently uses daycare services. Louise directly interacts with her children only in the mornings and evenings. The rest two of her children are older, and both entered an elementary school. They were raised by the same principle as the youngest, spending most of their time at the daycare facility from an early age.
After interviewing Louise regarding her experience with the childcare, she explained that at the beginning, all of her children had a negative experience with being left at the facility, and the oldest continued to have negative associations with the daycare after he went to school. According to Berger, this can be explained through the concept of separation anxiety, which is “an infant’s distress when a familiar caregiver leaves; most obvious between 9 and 14 months” (421). While separation anxiety is normal for children who have not yet reached the age of one, children of age three and older do not tend to experience this feeling as much. However, if the separation anxiety is still intense at this age, the child might develop some problems socializing with other people. Louise admitted that her oldest has trouble interacting and playing with other children at school. Even though the second child does not experience the same difficulties as his brother, despite being raised the same way, the separation anxiety might have been caused by Louise distancing herself from her children.
Similarly, the problem of choosing between a child-centered and a teacher-directed education should be approached carefully. I do not have children; however, if I did, I would prefer them to go to the teacher-directed preschool because I want them to develop socializing skills that a child-centered preschool fails to give. According to Berger, a child-centered education encourages a child to learn new material in their way, which improves the quality of the possessed knowledge (596). However, some children studying by a child-centered program may lack literacy skills that children at a teacher-directed preschool are required to learn. Therefore, most preferably, I would try to give my child a combination of these programs, encouraging them to explore new material differently without sacrificing the quality of education given by a teacher-directed preschool.
In conclusion, children’s lack of interaction with their parents may negatively affect their lives later and cause socializing problems with peers. This problem may intensify if the child is enrolled in a child-centered preschool where they have zero interactions with other children. I cannot entirely agree with Berger that a teacher-directed education does not allow a child to implement their creative thinking while solving a problem because it solely depends on how expensive the preschool is. Perhaps, trying both techniques in child education will bring out the best results in a child’s school performance.
Reference
Berger, Kathleen Stassen. Invitation to the Life Span. 4th ed., New York, NY: Worth Publishers, 2019.