is a very important principle around peer to peer relationships situations, or else you will soon find all your precious parenting efforts become reduced to the lowest common denominator.

Childminders
   In all its forms, childminding can be formal or informal, professional or amateur, paid or unpaid, institutional or home-based. In the category of non-professionals we have those like grandpar-ents, family friends and neighbours. In the professional arena we have the non-familial babysitters, nannies, au pairs, family day carers and, of course, the many childcare workers who staff the burgeoning industry of long day care centres and crèches. Beyond the age of 4 (or in many places 2 or 3), we have pre-schools, whose function - irrespective of the "educational curriculum" they include - I would class as just childminding by stealth.
   Irrespective of the needs and choices for so many women to work outside their home - yet partly because of it - the whole modern syndrome of childminding is part of the trend to separate life into distinctly different child and parent realms, of satisfying the "I need / want lots of my parenting life away from my children". Although deep down many parents might not choose to run their lives this way, often the unwritten social rules make it so. Whilst childminding is at many times a definite need for parents and always has been so, I believe the enormous amount of time some children are minded to be improper for the early emotional development of the child. There are many historical, social and political factors why childminding has become so prevalent in our culture, including the following:
· the trend towards two income families
· the decline of the extended family
· the increasing isolationism of the nuclear family within its suburban bunkers - that is, basic unneighbourlyness
· the movement of employment away from inside the home and into the community
· a push by governments to entice women back into the workforce (most Western economies now rely on the double income family).
   Every one of these factors has disadvantaged the child in terms of its relationships with its parents and its immediate community. I believe parents should make a long hard assessment of the amount of time they have their children minded, and consider whether (i) they feel this is right within their own hearts, and (ii) the child feels disadvantaged or is exhibiting behaviours

which might stem from too much time away from them.
   If we examine the different types of child-minders, there is a substantial difference in, not only the empathetic qualities of those minders but also in the outcomes from the different options - that is outcomes for the parents and outcomes for the child. For example, a granny who loves that child as her own, will have a substantially different bent on how they should mind that child compared to say, a paid, childless, non-family member.
   A family relative, say a sibling, cousin, aunt or uncle of the parents, may or may not have childrearing experience. Whilst their minding may be useful to the parents, and their guardianship enjoyed by the child, their inexperience in dealing with children in difficult situations, or their conflicting ideals on bringing them up, may not be so well appreciated.
   A paid or unpaid teenage babysitter may well have "a great love of children" (as their resumes always say!) but does that necessarily qualify them to provide the nurture or guidance your child may need while you are away?
   If the purpose of the childminding is purely for safety purposes, such as the baby being asleep in their own bed, then such things do not matter greatly. The area of difficulty comes when a child is in need of consistent behavioural guidance - from about 4 to 24 months. During that phase, all babysitters (including oldies like grandparents) must be briefed on the "rules" which the parents want observed during their absence.
   More important than just the quality of the childminding, is the issue of separation. For a young child, I believe too much coming and going, too much shuffling between different minders is dis-integrating, almost schizophrenic for them. They can begin to live in several worlds, learn several sets of behaviours, absorb several "parenting" systems (the home one and the minding ones), which, in the end, leave parents greatly disempowered and their children confused as to which reality is likely to lead them closer to themselves. Parents so often receive conflicting reports about how their little one behaved when minded. You may be told they were - "Perfect, a little angel all day", only to find they turn into a maniac upon your return home or upon returning home from the childcare centre, behaving like some of the brats with whom they have just spent the day. Alternatively you may be told they turned into tyrants the moment you left, contrary to your own impressions that your child is shy and meek most of the time. All such