Kibbutz
daycares have always been considered the best in the world, as the same
metapelet* continues with her group of children for 3½ - 4 years.
--
Growing up in Groups, The Russian Day Care Center and The Israeli Kibbutz,
Joseph Marcus, editor, 1972, page 203
|
מטפלת |
(*Metapelet
is the Hebrew
term for infant nurse and child-care worker. Its plural is metaplot).
|
From birth to adulthood, children on Israeli kibbutzim
lived with their peers and metapelet (caretaker) in a children's house.
Come evening, their parents would spend two to three hours with them and
then tuck them into bed. "It was inhuman, really inhuman," says Dorit
Friedman, recalling her upbringing at Kibbutz Nachshon.
-- Mothering: The infant daycare
experiment by Peg Lopata, findarticles.com, Winter 1993
As a result,
communal childrearing practices are no longer
used in modern-day Israeli kibbutzim. "Israeli Kibbutzim are rapidly dismantling their collective child-care
centers because both the families and the community established that
even a limited disassociation of children from their parents at a tender
age is unacceptable".
-- "Children of the Universe", by Amitai Etzioni, Utne
Reader, May/June 1993, page 55
A barrage of studies found that the
graduates of kibbutz children’s facilities suffered disproportionately
from a range of psychological disorders, including attachment
deprivation traumas, major depression, schizophrenia, low self-esteem,
and alcohol and drug problems. By 1994, more than half of all children
on Israeli kibbutzim exhibited symptoms and psychopathologies associated
with insecure attachment.
--
To Kindle a Soul: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Parents and Teachers,
Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen,
©2001, p.106 |
In
the first kibbutzim founded in the Second Aliyah (1905-1914)…Child care
was collectivized, but the children spent afternoons and nights in their
parents’ rooms. Only in the Third Aliyah (1919-1920), probably under the
impact of still more radical socialist ideology, did children spend their
nights in dormitories that were part of the comprehensive house."
--Women in the Kibbutz,
Lionel Tiger & Joseph Shepher, ©1975, p. 162
"The
kibbutz system…may meet (Frederick) Engel’s (Marxist) demands more
completely than any social system (because) … Children of 90 per cent of
the kibbutzim who are younger than 14 live in (daycare) dormitories, starting at the
age of two to six weeks.”
--
Women in the Kibbutz,
Lionel Tiger & Joseph Shepher, ©1975, p.29-30
"..by
the early twenties the collective housing system was generally accepted,
with youngsters of all ages lodged in special (day-care) houses.
--
Women in the Kibbutz,
Lionel Tiger & Joseph Shepher, ©1975, p.38
"Right from its origins in the first decade of this century (1900's), one
of the founding tenets of the kibbutz philosophy was the idea that
children should be reared in communal houses, tended by professional
(child-care) specialists."
"This
(day care) was an efficient way for adults facing pressing work (kibbutzniks were
involved in building a nation from scratch) to, as one observer put it, 'get
rid of children'."
--
"It Takes a Marriage", The American
Enterprise,
May/June 1996
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