Early Child Care: The New Perspectives

by Stuart Piggott

Early Child Care is about the very young child--infant, toddler, and early preschool--in today's world. It grew out of a series of conferences sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Children's Hospital of Washington, D.C., and the Committee on Day Care of the Maternal and Child Health Section of the American Public Health Association. Each of the sponsoring agencies represents a focal point for pressures from groups concerned with improving the care of the young child. Faced with common concern, the three sponsoring agencies brought together a number of experts in the field to pool information and experience and to review research findings as a basis for sound planning for children less than three years of age.

The authors included in Early Child Care are pioneers in the true sense of the word.. Until recently, no one has tried to specify exactly what goes on between mother and her baby, who does what to whom in the exchange, and what happens if, instead of one mother, there is no mother, an alternating day and night mother, or many different substitutes for the mother. Until all that transpires between the mother and her baby in the best of circumstances is comprehended in sufficient detail that it can be confidently reproduced, it is impossible to make alternative plans. Early Child Care is an effort to identify what is known about young children and apply it to day-by-day programming.

Millions of mothers give their babies a good start, providing devoted and painstaking care. Such mothers somehow know when a child needs to be let alone--and when to respond. This volume attempts to define how such instincts can be reproduced in other settings.

402 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 2, 2008

About the author

Stuart Ernest Piggott, CBE, FBA, FSA, FRSE FSA Scot was an English archaeologist, best known for his work on prehistoric Wessex.

Piggott was born in Petersfield, Hampshire, the son of G. H. O. Piggott, and was educated there at Churcher's College. On leaving school in 1927 he took up a post as assistant at Reading Museum, where he developed an expertise in Neolithic pottery.

In 1928 he joined the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales and spent the next five years producing a revolutionary study of the site of Butser Hill, near Petersfield. He also worked with Eliot Cecil Curwen on their excavations at The Trundle causewayed enclosure in Sussex.

Still without any formal archaeological qualification, Piggott enrolled at Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler's Institute of Archaeology, London, taking his diploma in 1936. In 1937 he published another seminal paper, The Early Bronze Age in Wessex.

In 1958 Piggott published a survey of Scottish prehistory, Scotland before History, and in 1959 a popular introductory volume, Approach to Archaeology.