Homeschool News & Views

Issue 37, Sept 7, 2007

From Homeschool Helpers

In association with Pass It On Ministries

Greetings. This is Dan White with Homeschool Helpers.

There was a strong reaction in the country when a Southern Baptist Seminary began offering a homemaking major for the wives of the ministry students. This reaction came from liberals, predictably. But it also came from Christians. This reaction was not just that women should not choose to be homemakers. This reaction was that the university should not even offer a homemaking major, which is to say, women should not even be allowed to choose to be homemakers.

That is a bad sign for homeschoolers.

So what do homemakers do? Just what is it specifically that so many people are against?

We have twin granddaughters, about seven months old. When we were all on vacation together back in West Virginia a month ago, those twins began to crawl. I found that out when I almost tripped on one, because she was in a different room than she had been a moment before. I exclaimed, “How did she get over here?” We figured out, clever folks that we are, that she had crawled over there, and then we all oohed and aahed over that, as if this was the very first baby in all of history to learn to crawl. Now the girls are beginning to teeter: that is, they are just beginning to balance themselves to stand on their own, if only for a nano-moment. They don’t totter, yet. Just teeter.

The twin girls are doing very well. Their mother is constantly on the go with those two girls, feeding, unfeeding, dressing, undressing, putting them down for naps, getting them up from naps, getting them toys, picking up their toys – The mother is constantly tending to those babies. The average pre-schooler requires his or her mother's attention every four minutes, or 210 times a day.

If they aren’t tending to them, then the parents spend a lot of time just playing with them. We went in their home the other day and the mother was sprawled out on the floor with one girl on her belly and another at her feet.

And that is just as much of a need for the babies as changing a dirty diaper. Maybe more so.

Twins are more of a work load than just one baby, but not twice the work load. There is a certain volume efficiency that comes from taking care of twins, so it is not fully twice the work of one baby. Having a child takes a lot of work, time and attention. Seeing all of this shows us again, as if we didn’t know it before, having had five kids ourselves – being a mother is a full time job. It is not an eight hour job. It is a full time job.

What if this young mother had gone the normal route? Six weeks post-partum, and then puttim in day care? Six weeks of mother, then the rest of their young lives in an institution of some sort? What would these girls be like?

First of all, they would be sickly. For example, babies in day care centers have much more sickness.

From Ibabydoc.com: “The most common illnesses include upper respiratory infections, such as colds, flus, wheezing, ear infections and stomach viruses. Most of these illnesses occur because the child is exposed to that illness in another child or an adult. So, the best way to not get these illnesses is to not be exposed to them in the first place.

Things that increase exposure include, first and foremost, daycare attendance. If a child is in daycare, especially in the winter months, expect multiple illnesses. The average child (in daycare) will get eight to ten colds per year, lasting 10 - 14 days each, and clustering in the winter. This means that if a child gets two colds from March to September, and eight colds from September to March, each lasting two weeks, the child will be sick over half of the winter.”

This constant upper respiratory illness is so common they even have a name for it: daycare syndrome.

The twin girls have had one runny nose in their seven months of life.

But colds are not all that day care centers spread. From the web site daycaresdontcare.org: Maggie Gallagher, in the book Day Careless, said, “(Day care) exposes babies and toddlers to large numbers of biological strangers, many of whom are not toilet trained and who drool, making day care a breeding ground for infectious disease." One epidemiologist called day care centers “the open sewers of the twentieth century.” So if parents put their child in day care, it is almost a certainty that their child will have more colds, flu, worms, fungus, pink eye, and other such afflictions. Sometimes the day care diseases are much more serious, such as pneumonia.

Second, if these young parents had put their twin girls in day care, they would be relatively retarded mentally. These girls have been described repeatedly by others as being very alert. It has been demonstrated that kids raised in day care institutions have their mental growth retarded compared to those who are parent raised. That’s not surprising, is it? Do you think a baby is going to be more stimulated mentally by spending all day with its mother or all day in the care of a minimum wage worker who has a whole crew to take care of?

Research has found that maternal separation can profoundly affect the brain's biochemistry, with lifelong consequences for growth and mental ability. Mary Carlson of Harvard Medical School said, "Our findings support clinical research showing that infants cared for in (daycare) institutions grow slowly and have behavioural retardation".

Third, if these girls had been institutionalized at six weeks of age, they would be more hostile. Studies have demonstrated that day care kids are more hostile than mother care kids.

In July, 2003, the results of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development were made public. The study states, '....the strongest predictor of how well a child behaves was. ...maternal parenting...sensitivity- how attuned a mother is to a child's wants and needs. The behaviors of the sensitive mother are child centered; the sensitive mother is aware of the child's needs, moods, interests, and capabilities.'

The study also pointed out that the more time a child spends in child care, any care other than mommy, that child was more assertive, disobedient, and aggressive.

That means that when an absentee mother is with her day care child, she will spend a lot of her time fighting with a hostile kid, trying to get it under control.

The two girls are anything but upset. They cry when they are hungry, dirty or sleepy, and that’s understandable. I do pretty much the same thing. Most of the time they are peaceful.

Since all these problems with day care have become known, some churches are looking to avoid these problems with Christian day care centers. The idea is that if day care centers are staffed by caring Christian workers, then the day care problems will disappear.

How about that? Are they right?

Will day care diseases disappear?

No. The diseases come from the concept of kiddie kennels, where healthy and sick kids are thrown together. When both parents work away from the home, and there is no mother to be a homemaker, there is no one to take care of a sick child. Even if a baby gets sick, almost always the mother still has to go to her job. The sick kid goes to day care, and the other kids catch it.

If babies are put in a Christian day care run by a church, will they be retarded compared to those babies who are mother loved? Sure, they will. No day care worker, no matter how dedicated, is like a mother. There is no one like a mother. Think about your mother right now. There is no one in the world to you like your mother.

If young children are put in a Christian day care, will they be more hostile than mother loved children? Absolutely. Children need love. This is a spiritual principle, which goes way beyond the physical needs of food and diapers. Babies need love. Deep love is not shown by a kind day care worker who has to take care of six kids. Love is shown by a mother reading to her twins, singing to them as she puts them to sleep every day, and being sprawled out on the floor with one on her feet and one on her belly.

If children are put into a church daycare, will those children still have separation anxiety syndrome? That is, will they still cry when their mothers leave them? Yes.

Institutions can never love. That’s the main reason that homeschooling is the most excellent education. No institutional education, regardless of the expensive buildings or the latest equipment or the most recent educational theory, will ever match love tutoring. And that principle is the same, all the way down to birth. Day care will never be near mother care.

So Christian day care centers see the day care problems and try to correct the problem by relieving the symptoms, by having cleaner facilities and more caring workers. But day care is the problem because Mommy is missing. This is part of the overall pattern of the breaking up of the family. Families begin to break up when they split up.

When a church sets up a Christian day care, ultimately they contribute to the breakdown of the family in America. They help to produce children who are more sickly, retarded and hostile. Instead the churches need to encourage the mothers to raise their own children, and not offer to do it for them. The Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that 40% of mothers with children under 6 stay home with them. That means that the majority of mothers of young children don’t.

Then the churches say, “Oh, but these mothers just have to work. We raise their children for them because there’s no other choice.”

That is not so. America has its necessities and its niceties all mixed up. Almost all Americans spend money like crazy, and they think they have to do that. The churches should help young mothers stay with their children: encourage them, teach them and even help them financially to raise their own children. That is the most perfect way that a church can help its young mothers.

When the communists came into power in different nations around the world, one of the first things they did was start communal child rearing centers. That was forced on the people. America has done the same thing voluntarily. Churches should promote the family, because that’s how the knowledge of God is transmitted.

Churches have a conflict of interest. If a church runs a day care center so that their female members can work outside the home, then the church will get more contributions than if the moms stayed home.

The fact is that if a mother has a child, then that mother should love that child. No one else can be that child’s mother. And a mother does not love her baby from a distance.

A mother who is with her baby in the home is a homemaker. That’s what homemakers do. They love their babies in the active sense, not just in the abstract sense. Almost all homeschool mothers are homemakers. Surely some of those young ladies who major in homemaking in college will become homeschool mothers.

Ruth Graham, Billy Graham’s recently passed wife, said "A mother, like the Lord, needs to be a very present help in time of trouble." And you know what? More women are now choosing to raise their own babies. Maybe more of them will also choose to be homeschoolers.