Last week, I wrote that parents should be sceptical about claims that children in daycare are more "aggressive". And how right I was. It has emerged that Jay Belsky's claims have been challenged by colleagues involved in the same research. "Our results don't support his conclusions," says Margaret Burchinall, the leading statistician on the project. Parents should not start changing their lives and leaving work in reaction to the research - childcare is not a major risk factor for aggressive behaviour, she says. Belsky is a professor at Birkbeck College, London, who for 15 years has been arguing that mothers who work outside the home are depriving their children of the close, loving bonds they need. Did he interpret research results to advance the case of the "backlash" anti-working mother agenda? He is refusing to take journalists' calls. Another study last week got similar sensationalistic treatment from some sections of the media. According to the Government-funded study, "Grandparenthood in Modern Ireland", some grandparents believe that their grandchildren are ruling the roost to the detriment of family life. Grandparents "attributed this shift in the balance of power to both parents working and the guilt they might feel because their children are cared for by childminders or are in creches," the study says.
"Additionally, grandparents reported that when working parents arrive home in the evening they are too tired to interact with their children, feel guilty and compensate by acquiescing to their demands. These two factors, according to some grandparents, lead to a shift in power from parent to child in these families."
Hang on just a minute. Before we start taking this as gospel, let's consider that this study interviewed a tiny sample. A mere 58 grandparents - 44 women and 14 men - were interviewed for the research. And haven't grandparents always criticised their own children's child-rearing skills? Do we really want children to be cowed into submission, as our parents' generation was? After all, that was the generation that gave us Goldenbridge, where children were taught to suffer abuse and say nothing.
