Child Care Today: Getting It Right for Everyone - Hardcover

Leach, Penelope

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9781400042562: Child Care Today: Getting It Right for Everyone

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400042569 ISBN 13: 9781400042562

Publisher: Knopf, 2009

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From the universally admired author of the best-selling classic Your Baby and Child, the first comprehensive—and objective—book on the state of child care in America and the world today. Who is caring for today’s children? How well are they succeeding? What does care cost, and who is paying for it? How do parents go about choosing care for their children, and are they satisfied with what they find? Penelope Leach answers these and other urgent questions with facts and figures gathered from the most current research, brought to life by the voices of parents, including those involved in her own five-year study.

Leach sees “work-home balance” as being the major conundrum of the day. She delineates the challenge of fitting children’s unchanged needs into society’s changing demands and the dilemma of today’s parents needing to be in two places at once. She describes in detail the various ways Western countries address that challenge: care given by parents, extended family, and nonfamily; care provided in the child’s home, in other homes, and in professional settings; child care funded by paying parents or by the government. Considering the issues from the various viewpoints of politicians, policy makers, professionals, parents, and children themselves, the author discusses the impact of each kind of care on children of different ages.

Leach highlights the urgent need in America today for measures to raise the quality of child care, and to make the best care we can provide available to all families, just as it is (often by government mandate) in most other developed nations. Setting out clearly and candidly what is known about every aspect of child care—including the often hidden feelings and fears of parents—Penelope Leach presents a critical case for building and implementing an agenda for change.

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From the Back Cover:

Child care is the 21st century’s biggest unsolved conundrum: children’s needs have not changed, but in a world that puts a premium on paid employment and personal fulfilment, who should, who can, and who wants to meet them?

Children’s wellbeing – even survival – depends as it always has on somebody taking care of them every minute of every day and night. When most mothers and fathers are in paid employment, much of the day-to-day hands-on care of children has to be done by someone else. But who is to do that caring, and who should bear the costs?

In this book Penelope Leach, a world renowned expert on child development and parenting issues and co-director of the UK’s largest child care study, offers an honest evaluation of these complex issues. She considers the view points of politicians, parents, and children themselves, and summarises what international research can tell us about the effects of different kinds of care on families and children.

Economic recession lends the book additional urgency. Must employed parents work even longer hours to protect their jobs and incomes? Will governments retreat from family friendly policies such as paid parental leave and flexible working to protect small businesses? For Leach, what matters most is recognising that children’s care is not just the responsibility of parents, often struggling to be in two places at once, but is intrinsic to the well-being of the whole of society. Child care is problem not just for families, but for nations.

About the Author:

Penelope Leach was educated at Cambridge University and at the London School of Economics, where she received her Ph.D. in psychology, after which she studied many aspects of child development and child rearing under the auspices of Britain’s Medical Research Council. A Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a founding member of the U.K. branch of the World Association for Infant Mental Health, she works on both sides of the Atlantic in various capacities for organizations concerned with prenatal care and birth, family-friendly working practices, day care, and early years education. She has recently co-directed a major program of research in the United Kingdom into the effects of various forms and combinations of care on children’s development from birth to school age. Penelope Leach has two children and six grandchildren and lives in Lewes, England.

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