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阅读理解
The British psychoanalyst John Bowlby argues that separation from the parents during the sensitive“attachment”period from birth to three may scar a child’s personality and be likely to cause emotional problems in later life．Some people have drawn the conclusion from Bowlby’s work that children should not be made to experience day care before the age of three because they have to be separated from their parents if they go to the day care center and many people do believe this．But there are also arguments against such a strong conclusion．
Firstly, anthropologists(人类学家)point out that the separation between children and parents found in modern societies does not usually exist in traditional societies．For example, in some tribal(部落)societies, such as the Ngoni, the father and mother of a child did not raise their baby alone－far from it．Secondly, common sense tells us that day care would not be so widespread today if parents, care-takers found their children had problems with it．Statistical studies of this kind have not yet been carried out, and even if they were, the results would be certain to be complicated and controversial．Thirdly, in the last decade there have been a number of careful American studies of children in day care, and they have all reported that day care had a neutral or slightly positive effect on children’s development．But tests that have had to be used to measure this development are not widely enough accepted to settle the argument．
But Bowlby’s analysis raises the possibility that early daycare had delayed effects．The possibility that such day care might lead to, say, more mental illness or crime 15 to 20 years later can only be found out by the use of statistics．Whatever the long-term effects, parents sometimes find the immediate effects difficult to deal with．Children under three are likely to refuse to leave their parents and show unhappiness．At the age of three or three and a half almost all children find the changing from home to nursery(kindergarten)easy, and this is undoubtedly why more and more parents make use of day care at this time．The matter, then, is far from clear, though experience and available evidence indicate that early day care is reasonable for babies．
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