There are lots of reasons to worry about the mistakes the government will make this year but, for all that, because I have been lucky enough to talk with some of New Labour's luminaries in person (eg Jack Straw), of one very encouraging thing I am sure: this government is the first to appreciate the huge importance of social adjustment when it comes to meeting the needs of small children.
Of course, there is some debate within the ranks about how best to help parents do this. On the one hand, there is a real commitment to making it easier for mothers to leave work for the first year of their child's life. On the other, there is a conflicting school of thought that wants to encourage them back to work after that by providing daycare. Regarding the latter, I have some reservations, partly based on the scientific evidence and partly on my experience last year of observing toddlers in a Danish nursery as part of a British Council project.
The Danes have the best daycare system in the world. The carers are trained for three years and the ratio for under-threes is one to three. Seventy five per cent of 18-month-olds are in state-funded nurseries and a lot of the rest are cared for by minders at home. Hardly any parents of children over 18 months care for them during working hours.
For a week I observed six toddlers ranging between 14 and 22 months. For example, Mike, aged 18 months, had been there for three weeks. He howled for the first hour after his father dropped him off and during the day wandered aimlessly when not sitting vacantly staring into space. When reunited with his father at teatime he was distinctly surly with him. This pattern decreased in severity during the week and I daresay he will have adjusted to the arrangement within a further month.
The nursery goes to great lengths to foster a friendly, co-operative ethos, something conspicuously present in the Danes as adults.Interestingly, when I spent time with Mike and his family at their home he seemed quite different, full of beans. His parents seemed largely unaware that he was finding it tough going at the nursery.
Then there was 19-month-old Olga. She bit and scratched a number of children during my time there. The pedagogues interpreted this as attention-seeking and seemed oblivious of the evidence that group care under the age of three can cause aggressiveness. True, she was pretty angry when I observed her at home, but her mother said the actual biting and scratching had only begun after going to nursery.
It was a similar story with the other children I observed and did not leave me racing to put our two-year-old into a nursery. It made me all the more hopeful that the powers that be in Britain realise that a minder looking after only one or two children is the best substitute for toddlers of working mothers.
