Studies point to latent problems

An escalating trend to place pre-verbal infants into childcare has sparked an inquiry by Children's Commissioner John Angus.

The number of children under 2 in childcare leaped 47 per cent in the nine years to last July and now includes 25 per cent of all infants under 2.

With 57 per cent of 2-year-olds also in care, New Zealand's total of 36 per cent of all those under 3 in childcare is now among the highest in the world - in 2005, when the NZ figure was 32 per cent, we were seventh-highest out of 28 OECD nations.

Dr Angus has raised concerns about the resulting risks for reduced breastfeeding, disrupted attachment to parents, more exposure to infectious diseases, more stressful interactions and aggressive behaviour.

National Women's Hospital paediatrician Simon Rowley, a trustee of the Brainwave Trust, says research has found that levels of the stress hormone cortisol rise during the day for infants in childcare, in contrast to the normal pattern of being high in the morning and falling through the day.

"The first two years of life is when you develop one of the most important relationships in your life, the attachment relationship you have with one or two primary caregivers," Dr Rowley says.

"That relationship then becomes a template for your subsequent relationships.

"You can't do that if you're being looked after by mostly disinterested multiple caregivers, which is what sometimes happens in childcare.

"My hunch is we're going to look back in 25 years and say, how could we have got it so wrong?"

However, such a view is hotly contested. Margaret Sims, a New Zealand-born professor of education at the University of New England in Australia, argues in the latest issue of the journal The First Years that childcare workers can help provide a "circle of attachment" around infants as once happened in villages.

She quotes the Efe, a Pygmy people in Africa, where 18-week-old infants spend 60 per cent of their time with carers other than their mothers and are each cared for by up to 14 people.

"When mother is unavailable for whatever reason (employment, illness, stress, death), alternative attachment figures are able to provide the necessary support."

Professor Sims and Dr Anne Meade, who has led early childhood policymaking for successive New Zealand governments for 20 years, both argue that the essential component of quality childcare is therefore a secure attachment between each child and its primary caregiver or caregivers.

Jean Rockel, an Auckland University educationist who edits The First Years and is on an advisory panel for Dr Angus's inquiry, says the quality of New Zealand's 4900 childcare centres and home-based services is very uneven.

She visited one centre recently where 16 infants under 2 were crammed into one room with the minimum legal space of 2.5sq m per child. One whole wall was a line of two-tiered cots that pulled out of the wall "like cages".

"The children were only allowed out one hour a day, yet there was a nice outside area. It was all artificial grass but it did have some trees."

Mrs Rockel believes New Zealand should raise the minimum space per child and follow an Australian decision last month to lift the staff to children ratio for under-2s to 1:4 from January 2012 (now 1:5).

Dr Angus says he expects to make recommendations by June on "whether we need to strengthen the quality and access to information for parents making this choice".

He says the inquiry also raises the question of the right mix of subsidies.