Daycare centres the new child abusers?

According to Frank Haden, writing in today's Sunday Star Times, they are. He says, "Government (effectively) wants kindergartens to become daycare centres, with extended hours making it possible for mothers to dump their kids in a secure environment while they go away, sometimes far away, to work."

"In plain terms, this is official child abuse."

Daycare centres are mostly bad. Not because they are private, you understand, but because they,"disregard the fact that no pre-school child should be away from its mother for more than 3 or 4 hours at a time." And, "look into the background of troubled teenagers and you'll find many have spent much of their pre-school life in unsatisfactory commercial daycare."

My children attended both private daycare and kindergarten. There was no discernable difference in the standard of care .

But where Haden really trips up is blaming daycare for producing a "drug-soaked violent teenage generation." The overwhelming evidence is that those who end up in the youth courts have grown up in welfare homes where the state replaced the father.

Strangely enough the word "father" doesn't appear once in Haden's column.