ENDEAVOUR FORUM NEWSLETTER No. 113, FEBRUARY 2004

 

 

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PITY THE CLASS BULLY

 

Bullying in schools is big news at the present time.  There have always been bullies, but the problem appears to be reaching epidemic proportions of late, with headlines claiming bullying is responsible for a great deal of misery for school children, resulting in all kinds of  malaise among the victims,   even suicide.  Clues to possible reasons for the increase in bullying come from research  collated by the Howard Centre in Rockford, Illinois.  Its monthly publication “The Family in America: New Research", August 2003, edited by Dr. Allan Carlson, reports: 

"The mother who leaves her infant in day care so that she can return to employment may eventually put herself in the executive suite.  But far more quickly, she is likely to put her child in the grade school principal's office for raising Cain in the classroom. 

"The effect of early maternal employment in making children troublesome and aggressive recently received attention from child psychologist Lise M. Youngblade of the University of  Florida.  In examining data from 365 Midwest families with a third or fourth-grade child, Youngblade limned a clear pattern linking mothers' employment during the first year of their children’s lives and subsequent aggressive and problematic behaviour on the part of those children.  ‘Third and fourth-grade children whose mothers were employed during their first year of life', Youngblade reports 'evinced more acting out and less frustration tolerance and were nominated more often by peers for hitting and being mean than children whose mothers were not employed’.  The statistical linkage Youngblade found between early maternal employment and adverse behaviour among grade-school children persisted in sophisticated statistical models that take into account child gender, maternal ethnicity, social class, and current employment status. 

"Though Youngblade characterizes as 'modest' the adverse behaviour effects she has documented as a concomitant of early maternal employment, she acknowledges that the effects are 'comparable to or larger than the effect sizes of gender or social class'.  She concedes  that her findings are 'congruent with other studies in the US that link early [maternal] employment  to later negative outcomes, specifically aggressive, noncompliant, and acting out behaviour.'" 

"And although she emphasizes that the measured effects of maternal employment 'do not suggest pathological outcomes,' Youngblade cannot avoid a disturbing conclusion:  'Small effects which affect a lot of people may in the end have greater societal consequences than large effects which impact only a few'.  With good reason, Youngblade worries about 'the potential scope' of the effects she has documented, given the fact that maternal employment initiated in the first year of  life has become the norm in America". 

( Source:  Lise M. Youngblade, "Peer and teacher ratings of third and fourth-grade children's  social behaviour as a function of early maternal employment,", Journal of Child Psychology and  Psychiatry 44 [2003}: 477-488.)

Day-Care Bullies

The September 2003 issue of  "The Family in  America: New Research", cites further confirmation  of the data in Lise Youngblade’s research.

"Though day-care defenders often claim much for its educational benefits, new research suggests that what day-care teaches best is defiance and aggression.  The latest evidence of day-care's harmful effects comes out of one of the most ambitious, well-credentialed, and well-funded research teams ever assembled: the Early Child Care Research Network of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).  Having carefully monitored over one thousand children from birth to four and a half years, the NICHD scholars confirm what other researchers have repeatedly observed:  increasing hours in day care is  'predictive of more aggression and disobedience'.  Increased time in day care is also predictive of 'at risk [though not clinical] levels of problem behaviour'. 

"What makes the NICHD findings so damning for day-care defenders is that the stringent data analyses in this study establish incontrovertibly that children grow more aggressive and disobedient even in high-quality day care.    As the researchers acknowledge, the  'dose-response' links between increased time in day care and increased aggression, disobedience, and problematic behaviour persist 'even when quality, type, and instability of child care were controlled, and when maternal sensitivity and other family background factors were taken into account'. 

"The explosiveness of these findings may be inferred from the decision by the editors of Child Development to publish  eight commentaries along with this study suggesting (for instance) that  researchers on day care should not control for household income in their statistical analyses  (never mind that virtually all sociological models do control for income), since the higher  income of households who use day-care tends to erase the negative effects of that care.  But no amount of ideological sophistry can hide the unpleasant reality of dare-care incubated obnoxiousness". 

(Sources:  National Institute of Child Health and Human Development/ Early Child Care Research Network,  "Does Amount of Time Spent in Child Care Predict Socioemotional Adjustment During the Transition to Kindergarten?"  Child Development 74[2003]: 976-1005.   See also Nora S. Newcombe, "Some Controls Control Too Much"  Child Development 74 [2003]: 969-1226.)

 

 

 

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