Children’s
Minister Frances Fitzgerald wants money diverted from Child Benefit into
State-subsidised child care. She believes children will benefit, especially educationally,
from this.

However,
research showing that children benefit from early child care is based mainly on
children from  disadvantaged backgrounds and therefore she should be
very slow to extrapolate from this to the general population.

For example, Start Strong, an Irish organisation arguing for the benefits of child care cites research claiming that young children do indeed benefit later on from early formal education. However, this research is based on children from deprived backgrounds.

So the question is, when Minister Fitzgerald says in an unqualified way
that children will benefit from being placed in child care, what exact research is she basing her
claim on?

The Institute for Marriage and the Family in Canada quote Dr. Gordon Neufeld, a Vancouver-based developmental
psychologist, on the educational benefits of early child care.

He has said that it is better for children to go to school
at a later age, not earlier.  When asked what the gains from early
learning for small children are, Dr. Neufeld simply said: “I don’t think there
is anything to be gained except parental emancipation.”

Perhaps the Minister might like to speak to Dr Neufeld? (More about his views can be found here).