Editorial: Attacks on childcare need to be addressed

The culprit? The nursery or daycare centre at the end of your street, according to the tabloid interpretation of research into pre-school childcare (see Analysis, p11). "Nurseries turning children into thugs," said the Evening Standard last week. "Nursery tots will be yobs," was The Sun's take on the story.

Given the overheated rhetoric that routinely describes teenagers, and even children as young as eight or 10, as thugs, yobs and tearaways, it was only a matter of time before such terms started to be applied to even younger children. Looking at the headlines, you could be forgiven for thinking gangs of three-year-olds had been caught hanging around in parks drinking Tennants Export. In fact, the headlines were describing research that found the more time children spent in daycare, the more likely they were to be disobedient, nasty to other children or demand a lot of attention. The implication? Send your child to nursery and you're a bad parent. Oh, and all the money the Government is spending on childcare to enable mothers to go back to work? It's not just a waste of money but is actively harming children. Most of the stories ignored an equally important finding; that an even stronger predictor of how well a child behaves was how attuned a mother is to her child's needs.