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The British psychoanalyst John Bowlby maintains that separation from the parents during the sensitive attachment period from birth to three may scar a childs personality and predispose to emotional problems in later life. Some people have drawn the conclusion from Bowlbys work that children should not be subjected to day care before the age of three because of the parental separation it entails， and many people do believe this. But there are also arguments against such a strong conclusion. Firstly， anthropologists point out that the insulated love affair between children and parents found in modern societies does not usually exist in traditional societies. For example， we saw earlier that among the Ngoni the father and mother of a child did not rear their infant alonefar from it. Secondly， common sense tells us that day care would not so widespread today if parents， caretakers found children had problems with it. Statistical studies of this kind have not yet been carried out， and even if they were， the results would be certain to be complicated and controversial. Thirdly， in the last decade， there have been a number of careful American studies of children in day care， and they have uniformly reported that day care had a neutral or slightly positive effect on childrens development. But tests that have had to be used to measure this development are not widely enough accepted to settle the issue. | 
