Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/what-did-soviet-child-care-look-like-in-december-89/5007230/
Our son spent the first semester of his junior year in college in Moscow to build his Russian language skills and gain experience as a political science student. As parents and as pediatricians, we decided to check up on our son, and look at Soviet child care. Many child care advocates remember when President Nixon vetoed federal legislation for public funding of early childhood services to avoid "sovietizing" American children. The political neglect of early childhood that followed put the US far behind the rest of the developed world in addressing the needs of its young citizens. We wondered what child care in the USSR really looked like, and what lessons we could learn from it now that the US is planning how to fund and administer more and better early childhood services.A Commitment to Children
The USSR generally suffers from poor quality consumer goods and workmanship. But in the four re-publics we visited, child care was the one exception to the general dearth of quality. We saw a common com-mitment of government, parents, and professionals to providing the best of what is available for young children. Everyone told us that the primary purpose of ...