« I Wish This Were Funny | Main | Too Good Not to Repeat »

October 23, 2005

Ummm..... Duh!!!

From Dare to Know comes this stunning scientific research result:

One of the longest and most detailed studies of UK childcare has concluded that young children who are looked after by their mothers do significantly better in developmental tests than those cared for in nurseries, by childminders or relatives.

The study on children from birth to three will reignite the controversy over the best way to bring up young children. It found babies and toddlers fared worst when they were given group nursery care. Those cared for by friends or grandparents or other relatives did a little better while those looked after by nannies or childminders were rated second only to those cared for by mothers.


In the immortal words of James Taranto, what would babies do without detailed studies?

I am a huge believer in the scientific method: it gives us a way to find new knowledge from prior discoveries and new observations, coupled with reason and testing. But I abhor the fetishization of science, and in particular the seeming need by some to do large, expensive studies on things that are well known through centuries of observation and noting of human behavior or the properties of the world around us. We don't need studies to tell us that the Sun is hot, though some careful observation and measurement can tell us how hot, and that can give us insights into properties of the Sun that are not directly observable, like its internal processes. But the whole reason that we need a study like this is because of all of the pseudo-scientific babble about the "right" way to raise your children and so forth.

Sometimes, it just takes a little common sense to find the right answer, and all the scientific approaches to problems that are not fundamentally ones of discovery amounts to rationalization of a profoundly inhuman "solution" that someone is eager to push. And if we would just stand back a moment and think, "Hey, babies are built to be with their moms", we could save a huge amount of effort and wasted lives. (Dr. Spock may have been responsible for more psychopaths than any other human.)

Posted by jeff at October 23, 2005 9:57 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.caerdroia.org/MT/mt-tb.cgi/552

Comments

Years ago the characteristics we now refer to as “attachment disorder” were a commonplace among the children of the wealthy who were typically raised by nannies. The disorder has spread to the middle class and the working poor through overuse of nannies, daycare, etc.

Since, as Chesterton observed, a radical is one who looks at traditional social arrangements and says “Throw that old-fashioned stuff out! I don't see the use of it.” while a conservative is one who looks at traditional social arrangements and says “I don't understand [i.e. can't prove] the use of that old custom. Better keep it.”

That would make me a conservative but, since I also believe in freedom, I'm also a liberal. That's why, for the last 40 years, I've thought of myself as a Whig—a liberal conservative.

Posted by: Dave Schuler [TypeKey Profile Page] at October 24, 2005 11:35 AM

Yup, it seems like a rare example of scientism (or the uncritical application of pseudo-scientific method to a completely inappropriate field of investigation) actually being the lesser evil enacted in the cause of redressing a terrible and persistant wrong.

Posted by: Carlotta at October 25, 2005 9:54 AM