CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the Study
The quality of life for a child and the contributions the child makes to the society as an adult can be traced back to the first few years of life. From birth until about five years old, a child undergoes tremendous growth and change. If this period of life includes support for growth in cognition, language, motor skills, adaptive skills and social-emotional functioning, the child is more likely to succeed in school and later contribute meaningfully to the society. A good early childhood care and education provides the intervention programmes that support children’s survival growth, development and learning including health, nutrition and hygiene, cognitive, social, physical and emotional development from birth to entry into primary school in formal, informal and non-formal settings (UNESCO, 2007).
Anyakogu (2005), states that the primary location for early childhood education and development is the home. This is because, the home is the first contact the child had in order to interact effectively with both parents and siblings. The home is a place, where learning begins for the child. A place the child learns how to respect parents and to imitate and recognize people around him. Traditionally, the responsibility for child care in Nigeria as elsewhere in Africa rests on the extended family and the wider community. These members of the society contribute to the upbringing of the child, providing him or her with a wide range of stimulating interactions that will affect the child’s development positively, especially in psycho-social terms.
In recent decades, rapid urbanization has increasingly eroded this traditional pattern of the child care. Hodges (2001) observed that “’for the approximately one third of families who now live in the cities, the mutual support that was a prominent nature of rural life has given way to situation where each household is to a large extent responsible on its own for the care of children”. Living in cities implies that many mothers are engaged outside the home or otherwise for most part of the day and this has implication for child upbringing in the family (Adeleke, 2006). This is because, many parents’ love and burning desires for paid job and monetary reward, in order to make the family more comfortable and to meet up with the payment of other home bills, have taken over parents’ love and care for their children. This has caused many parents to leave their children at the hand of immature house-helps and nannies, hence poor growth and development of the child in the society and the school.
Parental roles in early childhood development are varied. The quality of care given to young children affects their development. Parents and in particular mothers, are responsible for feeding, hygiene in the house as well as the response to illness in young children. For babies, mothers breast milk offer the best and most complete food. Breast milk provides babies with antibodies, which help to keep off the risk of illness (Leon, 2005). Parents especially mothers who are engaged in routine jobs, do not have time to feed the baby with adequate breast milk. Also, due to education and civilization, most mothers believe that feeding the baby with breast milk will affect their breasts and thereby making them to look older than their ages. Therefore, they fail to feed their babies with the breast milk within the required period. This has caused most children to have poor growth and social development, and by extension, poor academic achievement in school.