Like myself, many more women these days have pursued education and a professional career. The last decades have seen a dramatic increase in the number of females pursuing meaningful employment. Subsequently most women can empathise with the painful dilemma of leaving their child to return to the workplace.
Are we doing the right thing by going back to work and leaving our child in the hands of another? Do we even have the choice? Whether it be for financial reasons or for our own sanity, many women are dealing with the guilt of these decisions we've made every day.
Get on the internet, read child development books and talk to those with strong one-sided views and you will be confronted with the view that leaving your child at a young age is harmful and damaging to their personality and emotional development.
What I can tell you is that children who enjoy an attentive relationship where their physical and emotional needs are actively being met develop a sense of security with regard to their existence in this world. A healthy attachment to their dominant caregiver/s creates a sense of security in the child, allowing the child the confidence to venture out and explore their world.
So is it a positive thing to allow our children the opportunity to branch out, explore their world and develop more than one relationship of attachment.
I believe so. Children with a secure emotional attachment to the dominant caregiver are more likely to feel secure in knowing their parent will return for them when left with someone else. Leaving them in the care of another trusted caregiver encourages the child to learn comfort and a sense of safety with another adult, other than the parent. It is inevitable that at some point in time every child will be separated from the dominant caregiver. Children who experience this separation for the first time when starting school are more likely to experience separation anxiety and hence have greater difficulty with the transition to school.
Children who build trusted relationships with more people than just their dominant caregiver develop a greater sense of confidence and independence. These children are more likely to demonstrate confidence with their peers and subsequently develop healthy peer relationships. They are typically the kids who are happy to run off and join in the play the minute you walk into a kids party.
Children who rarely leave the company of their parent are perhaps more likely to demonstrate an unwillingness to separate from the parent. Perhaps they are learning that it is only my mum, or only my dad who is safe. Being separated from that security can then become quite challenging for the child when confronted with that experience later in their life.
And of course, sometimes (maybe a lot of the time) it is our own anxieties about leaving our child with another trusted adult that is most problematic. We worry about how they will cope without us there, but perhaps it is more accurate to suggest that we worry how we will cope without being there. And most often, the child is fine. We on the other hand are the ones struggling to cope with the separation. We are convinced that they wont be able to settle without us there, that they wont feed properly because no-one knows quite the right way to hold the bottle or spoon feed the pumpkin mash. 10 phone calls over the space of 5 hours questioning their every action...who is it that's not coping? And if they aren't coping, perhaps that is an indication that we need to pursue the issue of separation from the dominant caregiver in a controlled way to encourage the sense of security, self confidence and independence that every parent wants for their child.
Kurly K
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