Why Day Care Kids Don’t Play Outside

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More than half of American children between the ages of 3 and 6 are in child care centers or preschools, so the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center recently released the results of a study of children’s physical activity in day care settings. (NY Times, 5/6/08)

The researchers surveyed staff members at 34 area child care centers to find out more about how kids spend their time while they’re in day care, including the reasons why they may or may not spend time outside. They presented the findings recently at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in Honolulu, Hawaii.  The findings may surprise you.

Children are kept inside by day care workers if they show up in flip-flops rather than sneakers, or if they don’t have a coat on a chilly day.  If only one child doesn’t have the right clothes for outdoor play, the whole group may be kept indoors.  Occasionally, parents will deliberately drop off a child without a coat, because they don’t want the child going outside that day.

Mulch is often used to landscape playgrounds and outdoor spaces at child care centers.  The researchers found that kids eat the mulch, get it caught in their shoes or use it as weapons, so day care staff indicated that outdoor play can sometimes be troublesome.

Also the feelings of teachers and parents influence whether or not children play outside.  Children learn important motor and social skills by learning to kick a ball or negotiating with another child for a turn on the swing, but teachers said they felt pressure from some parents who were more concerned with children spending time on academic skills.

In addition, some day care workers said it was just too much trouble and took too much time to bundle up the kids during cold weather, while other workers said they just didn’t like going outside.

What more can be said about institutionalized day orphanages?

More on Parental Irresponsibility

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Sue Shellenbarger writes a column for The Wall Street Journal that generally sends me up any available wall. The column is entitled “Home & Family,” and I keep up with it if only to counter its content.

She recently answered a reader’s question (4/30/08) that had to do with a divorced father wanting to take his 10 year old son to his native Australia for 10 days, but his ex-wife is fighting the plan. The father contends that life lessons of such a vacation trump school. He’s going to court for the right to take him, and asks Shellenbarger what she thinks.

First of all, there are laws which prohibit one parent from taking a child out of the country without the express permission of the other. The reason is obvious: child-stealing. Secondly, having divorced parents at war with each other over a child hurts the child as he or she feels divided loyalties and tremendous anxiety. Thirdly, taking a child out of school for a protracted trip teaches the child that education is less of a priority than personal desires for fun. This father could arrange a summer trip when no school is missed. My guess is that this is a major power play.

Shellenbarger not only doesn’t deal with any of these issues, but she focuses on the whim of the child: if he would be comfortable with the trip; if he would see it as an adventure….in other words, just considering what the kid wants. What?? Of course the kid wants to be out of school and hanging out with dingos and kangaroos!

“The ideal route would be for you and your ex-wife to set aside your personal feelings and focus on what he truly wants,” contributes a New Jersey Marriage and Family Therapist. “[It] depends on your son’s openness to the experience. Try to give him a free and honest choice, unfettered by feelings of loyalty to either of you or fear of letting you down.”

Is she kidding? How can a ten year old do that? And why put the burden on the child? Aren’t the parents supposed to want and do what is best for the child? This is more of the “if it feels good it is good” school of thought - an experiment whose failure doesn’t seem to curtail its perpetuation.

Are Disabled Children Dispensable?

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Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) is adamant in his support for abortion on demand.  Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) is as adamant in his support for the illegalization of abortion.  However, as odd as it may seem, they have joined forces in a bill (S1810), the “Prenatally and Postnatally Diagnosed Condition Awareness Act.”  Their bill would require parents faced with pre- and post-natal diagnoses of disability to receive “timely, scientific, and nondirective counseling about the conditions”  as well as “up-to-date, comprehensive information about life expectancy, development potential, and quality of life”  for a child born with Down syndrome or any other genetic disability, as well as “referrals to providers of key support services.”

Their hope is that when parents receive a more complete picture, more of them will welcome their disabled babies into the world, instead of choosing termination.  Nice bedfellows.

Father and Mother Know Best

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“Home-schooled students are routinely high performers on standardized academic tests, beating their public school peers on average by as much as 30 percentile points, regardless of the subject.  They perform well on tests like the SAT - and colleges actively recruit them both for their high scores and the diversity they bring to campus.” (Wall Street Journal 3/22/08).

The 166,000 families in California that choose to educate their children at home do so largely for three reasons:  religious, protecting their children from gangs and drugs, and mostly because they want to ensure their children a good education.

Considering the overwhelming success of home-schooling, one would think it perplexing that a California court ruled in March that parents cannot home-school their children without government certification.  Fascinating, since non-credentialed parents spend their time teaching English, math and science precisely because they don’t think the public schools do a good enough job!

You should know that this whole court case was not about quality of education.  The case was initiated by the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services after one - ONE - home-schooled child reportedly complained of physical abuse by his father.  A lawyer assigned to that child invoked the truancy law to get the children enrolled in a public school and away from the parents (California law requires children between six and 18 to attend a full-time day school.  Failure to comply means breaking the truancy laws).

So, a single case of parental abuse is being used to promote the certification of all parents who make that huge commitment to their children’s education.  Unbelievable.

Between 1999 and 2003, the rate of home-schooling increased by 29% and the performance results speak for themselves.  Of course, the California Teacher’s Union is ecstatic about this outcome - in spite of the facts that demonstrate that, on the average, children do better academically outside of their classrooms.

Are Dads Unnecessary?

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For the life of me, I don’t know what single women “by choice” tell their sons about what to look forward to in their futures. 

“Randy” sent me the front page of her local newspaper, with an article touting “Moms Single By Choice.”   Randy writes:

 [The article is about w]omen in their late 30s or 40s who have no husbands but want a kid.  A few adopt, while sperm bank fertilization impregnates many of them.

I have learned from listening to your radio program for the past two years that a woman’s selfish desire to have a kid should be trumped by the needs of a child who would be best brought up in a two-parent family - mom and dad, married, with a stable home.

Ninety percent of the article promotes this behavior as an acceptable “choice.”  The article explains the pain a woman goes through when she realizes that Mr. Right is not coming as they age into their late 30s or early 40s.  The article sympathizes with these brave career women who can afford full-time nannies and day care.  One woman is quoted as saying that this was ‘the best decision she ever made,’ while the final word plainly says to ‘go for it.’  There are a couple of brief paragraphs buried late in the article mentioning the conservative point of view.  It states that hundreds of studies have shows that mom and dad homes are superior to single-parent homes.  Also, very briefly stated is that ‘choice mothers are, in effect, teaching their children that men are not important to families, marriages, or children.’

I sympathize with the children of these single moms “by choice.”  They are intentionally robbed of a father.  More than traditional money-earning, protecting and fixing things around the house, the dad does something else.  He has a place in the family where he shows monogamy and daily behavior as a father and man should behave.  He is a role model, and an example of the kind of person sons should grow up to resemble, and daughters should grow up to look for.”

Hey, Randy, in this “PC” and feminist-brainwashed society, whatever an adult wants always trumps what children need!  If a woman who never bothered to become “Miss Right,” does want to devote herself to raising a child (without nannies and day-care), I’m all for her adopting an older or difficult-to-place child.  Now, that would be a God-send.

Marriage Matters to Children

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The Claremont Institute (http://www.claremont.org/) recently published two book reviews having to do with the significance of marriage to the well-being of children, and the cohesiveness of society in general.  The books reviewed are:  “Marriage and Caste in America:  Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age,” by Kay S. Hymowitz, and “The Future of Marriage,” by David Blankenhorn.

These are two fascinating and informational books that you ought to read.  The reviewer, F. Carolyn Graglia, writes:  “Over the past four decades, American adults have seemed more concerned with enjoying their own existence than with the generation and welfare of children.” And in her book, Hymowitz writes:  “Children of single mothers are less successful on just about every measure than children growing up with their married parents regardless of their income, race, or educational levels:  they are more prone to drug and alcohol abuse, to crime, and to school failure; they are less likely to graduate from college; they are more likelyl to have children at a young age, and more likely to do so when they are unmarried. Soaring divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births (37% of U. S.  births are illegitimate) have made ours a nation of separate and unequal families.”

The propensity to divorce is apparently correlated with two-income families. Hymowitz notes that the “traditional families, with breadwinner husband and stay-at-home wife had the lowest rate of divorce.”  Women employed 80% of the time since the birth of their first child are twice as likely to be divorced as stay-at-home moms. 

Today, more than 40% of all first marriages end in divorce (the rates for second and third marriages are higher), and more than half of all U.S. children will spend “at least a significant part of their childhood living apart from their father.”

Shacking up, having babies out of wedlock as an entitlement for working women who don’t have the time or inclination to create a marriage, having babies out of wedlock because of irresponsible sexual behavior (and not considering adoption to a two-parent mom and dad)…all of these now-normalized behaviors reek of narcissism and indicate that we worry less about children and more about adults being unfettered by morality, good sense, or compassion to the needs of children.

Nanny-Cam Horrors

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It’s been all over the news.  A “nanny-cam” in the home of two twin preemies showed the nanny handling the children like trash bags.  I mean, if you know it’s going to be shown on Nancy Grace’s television program, it has to be bad!

The single most important issue, however, was never addressed.  Where were their parents?  These delicate babies were in the hands of hired help and not their own parents.  Nowhere in the news pieces did anyone suggest that these parents had to work or risk being homeless.  Quite the contrary.

There are babies who have been forgotten, neglected, and abused in day-care centers.  Now, nannies are doing the same in the parents’ home.  Parents themselves are forgetting their own children in cars, which literally causes the children to be poached to death.  When will the tide turn back to parents making their children their number one priority, and moving their dual careers or owning “things” to a lower spot on their list?  Until then, more horrifying stories are sure to come.

Monster Kids

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What’s happening (so many people wonder) that is making at least half of kindergartners engage in frequent fighting, aggression, and tantrums?  Is it ADD or ADHD or any more letters from the beginning of the alphabet?  Yes, it must be…so drug ‘em into obedience!

Over the last year, we’ve also seen many reports that pre-schoolers were being thrown out, because of “bad behavior,” including an unwillingness to cooperate, to listen to “teachers,” and even a tendency to assault other children.  Well, we can drug ‘em for that, too.  Or, how ’bout yoga and other forms of meditation? (I personally find that foot massages take off my edges!).

We have two choices:  figure out how to get control of these out-of-control kids, or how not to drive them to distraction in the first place.  I vote for “Door #2.”

A 2006 study in the journal “Early Childhood Research Quarterly” demonstrated that day-care children show increases in the stress hormone cortisol throughout the day compared to children at home. 

A 2007 study, headed by Susanna Loeb, an Associate Professor of Education at Stanford University, found that children who spend more time in child-care centers early in life show more behavior problems in later years, compared with kids who have spent less time away from home and momma, and that the negative effects were greater among children who had entered child-care centers at earlier ages.

It takes a momma and a daddy, and a warm, loving home to get a child ready to deal with the unpredictable, unfair, restrictive, and demanding realities of life.  Please give them that time with you.