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Notes -
I still think parents in some form or another are necessary for psychiatric health. It seems like just observationally a lot of social pathologies and mental health issues went through the roof after the widespread use of institutional daycares and preschool. We’ve essentially been kenneling our kids for much of their waking lives, and im becoming much more convinced that, especially if it starts young, it has a lot of negative impacts on the mental health of the child as they can’t form the strong family bonds that existed for most of human history. It’s actually a pretty odd social experiment that we did to ourselves without thinking about it.
If you think about a child in daycare maybe a good one will have 2 adults and 8-10 kids. That child is a number. Not the caregiver’s fault, but she’s not the kid’s parent and she can’t care as much as a parent could. And even if she did, she has other children to worry about. Now this starts in the USA especially in infancy maybe 8 weeks or so, depending on the leave offered to the mother (fathers rarely get leave). And because it covers the working hours of parents, including commute, you might have a child in daycare from 8am to 6pm and be putting the baby to bed soon after. The child gets weekends with mom and dad, and spends most of the time in institutional care.
Going further to deprive future children of any parental bonding at all would likely make that situation much worse. I suspect that it would create sociopathic behaviors in most children in that situation. How does a child learn to care about others if they never received the same care themselves? Could they feel the pain and suffering they cause another human being? If they could, would they care?
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