Friday, November 11, 2005

Study: Preschool harms children's development

What an interesting article...

Click on the title of this post to link back to the whole article.

I'd love to read the actual paper and see the different variables in the study, like the ages of the children, the type of preschool they went to (morning, afternoon? all day?) etc... Anyways, I'll file this away for those days when I start to worry about whether or not I'm screwing up my kids by not sending them to preschool etc... Because, if the study found this about preschoolers, I don't see why it would change much for elementary school kids (although it would be hard to do a study like that without bias because almost everyone sends their kids to grade 1). Anyone have any thoughts on this?

"...The biggest eye-opener is that the suppression of social and emotional development, stemming from long hours in preschool, is felt most strongly by children from better-off families," said UC Berkeley sociologist and study co-author Bruce Fuller.
On average, the report finds that the earlier a child enters a preschool center, the slower his or her pace of social development, while cognitive skills in pre-reading and math are stronger when children first enter a preschool program between the ages of 2 and 3. "

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

this is very confusing to me Mel. first of all the concept of preschool is that it is very short, not every day of the week, just a couple and for only a few hours at time and then mostly dealing with encrichment topics such as crafts, games, listening to stories, etc. It is not day care. Also, it is for children who are 4 years old not younger. that was my understanding when Jen and Doug went to preschool. Doug loved his experience with Miss Pam and developed friends that are still his today. I love seeing these "kids" as young adults because I only remember them as round faced little wonders. Jen went to a wonderful school in Calgary and then in Miami I wasn't crazy about her teacher. She and Jen got into control issues. I wonder why. LOL ( I think Jen was smarter than she.)