Raising Babies: Should under 3s go to nursery?
Steve Biddulph
(Harper Thorsons, $128)
This is probably not a book most busy working parents will want to read. Even the author Steve Biddulph, a psychologist and parenting advocate for 30 years, acknowledges in his introduction that it's likely to anger some readers and unsettle others.
Why? Basically because it says what many parents don't want to hear. It says what they fear, but for economic reasons choose to ignore or let themselves be persuaded otherwise.
Which is that no child under three should be placed in the care of a day nursery and that only someone who really loves a child will give them the attention, stimulation and care they need to develop emotionally.
Biddulph is writing specifically about Britain, where day-care nurseries or child-minders are usually the only option for mothers who want or need to return to work. In the book, he argues his case by pooling the growing mountain of research against nursery care and the effect such care has on the development of the child in the first years of life.