From Italy, a country that reputedly has some of the best day-care centers in the world, comes the lesson that cultural values significantly influence the kind of care children receive.

In many Italian cities, Rebecca New, associate professor of education says, families have mastered the notion of gestina sociale (or local social management), where the concept of family doesn't end once the station wagon pulls away. Instead, the family's participation in the care and education of the child continues as they work with not only the teachers but also with other citizens from the larger community to determine the characteristics and aims of their early care and educational programs.

Day care in Italy is considered the child's natural environment, echoes researcher Chiara Bove, who is working with New and Bruce Mallory (also a professor of education at UNH) on a collaborative study of home-school relations in five cities in Italy. Nationally more than 90 percent of Italian three-year-olds attend some form of preschool, and many infants attend infant-toddler centers as well. Although Bove also confesses that some mothers of these infants feel guilty, "We try not to focus on the guilt," she says.

Good-quality child care fosters language and cognitive development as well as better peer relations, according to Kathleen McCartney.

Nor is guilt a common component of the Italian day-care experience. Says New, "I interviewed one mother who seemed to share many experiences in common with me. Her responses to most of the interview questions were similar to how I might have responded myself. We went back and forth in the interview, each of us speaking in both Italian and English. And yet, when I asked her what she sees as the role of day care in a child's life, I was again reminded of how differently parents of diverse cultural settings interpret their children's needs.

"The woman said, 'I think as soon as a child is born, but definitely by three or four months old, she needs to be in day care. A child needs the community of other children and adults. And the community needs to respond to her with all the rights of a citizen.'"

"I was shocked, not so much by her response, as by my own thoughts. I had not ever imagined that day care for the young infant would be a (first) choice for the child. The mother went on to explain, however, that 'here, we work together with the teachers and then everyone learns more about the child.'"

At one preschool New observed, she noticed something that would have been peculiar for American child-care centers. It was March and the teachers were putting on the children's coats, even for the five- and six-year-olds. Puzzled, New asked them if they'd ever heard of the coat trick.

New's daughter Francesca at age two could take her coat, lay it on the floor upside down and flip it up and over her head, thus putting her coat on by herself. New explained to the Italian teachers that it made her daughter feel proud and independent to be able to put her own coat on—and it got her out the door faster. They immediately took her to task. "Americans are so obsessed with teaching their children 'independence.' What you're really telling them is that they shouldn't need anyone else. Is that what you want your child to think, that at two you feel she shouldn't need you?"

Besides, one teacher told New, if we didn't button their coats for them, we wouldn't have a chance to do this: she gathered the collar of New's jacket in her hands and swooping down, kissed her on the check.

We Americans place great stock in autonomy, independence and speed. Yet as the Italians so deftly demonstrated to New, we pay a price for our values—and so, it seems, do our children.

—S.W.S.

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