It is a strange mutation of feminism that is immediately threatened by the assertion of children's rights. When, in 1986, US psychologist Jay Belsky posed the question that full-time day care might be damaging for pre-school children, in his paper "Infant Day-Care - a Cause for Concern?", he was denounced from the altars of political correctness.

Belsky did not enter the debate with a set agenda, however. He had argued in a previous paper that most concerns about infant day care just didn't stand up scientifically. When he returned to the subject, he found a "slow, steady trickle of evidence" which convinced him that he had been mistaken and he was not afraid to say so.

Today, he is still less afraid - and, across the Irish Sea at least, people are listening to him. An Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues has been set up in Birkbeck College in London, and Belsky has been appointed its director. He kicked off his stint with a lecture, to be published later this year, entitled "Developmental Risk (Still) Associated with Early Child Care".

Belsky claims that more than 20 hours a week of what he calls "non-maternal" care, begun early in life and continuing through the pre-school years, may be associated with developmental risks such as insecure attachment to parents, more aggression, more non-compliance and a less good relationship with other children. His new-found confidence in his position springs from the findings of the soon-to-be-published National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Child Care Study, a continuing review of 1,000 families in the US. Earlier studies prefigure some of its findings.

One 1990 study of 200 eight-and nine-year-olds in the US found that children who had been in "non-maternal" care for more than 30 hours a week from their first year until they went to school were rated lowest in conduct by teachers, were rated by mothers and teachers as less compliant and were less well liked by their peers.

It is typical of Belsky that he admits he doesn't know why this is. The theory that babies and toddlers need to have a secure relationship with a primary care-giver in order to negotiate the world with confidence is, however, far from new - John Bowlby published his work on the early attachment of infants in 1969. However, the idea that that attachment figure has to be the mother has since been questioned. Most recently in Ireland, in Bernie Purcell's For Our Own Good: Childcare Issues in Ire- land. But Belsky points out that other primary care-givers simply don't tend to stay the course - and this includes fathers and relations, at least in the US. So a valid comparison can't be made.

If fathers were more often their children's primary care-giver, then a real comparison between fathers' and mothers' care could be made. If it were favourable, the assertion of young children's right to one-to-one care would not be seen as an attack on women's right to work. But if it were proved again and again that only mothers can do the work of early parenting, then mothers would have to decide whether or not to alter the pattern of their lives.

But hiding the truth will not further the cause of feminism. And far from arguing for mothers' silent retreat to the kitchen, Belsky wants his work to justify, on "humanitarian grounds", the provision of long, preferably paid, parental leave, child-friendly tax policies and high-quality child care. Controversially, however, he finds that the "dosage" of childcare matters far more than its quality.

The determination with which the question, "What do children need?", is being asked in the UK is humbling in comparison to the debate on childcare provision in Ireland.

Belsky's Birkbeck research team has been appointed to monitor the British government's new Sure Start programme, which will see nearly a billion pounds dedicated to demolishing social disadvantage for children: projects already announced include the creation of 900 new "neighbourhood nursery centres" and a breast-feeding phone counselling service, operating seven days a week.

These developments are happening against the background of the report of the UK government's Childcare Commission, whose recommendations included funding of up to £150 a week to allow parents of children under three to stay home or make a child-minding arrangement with a relation or professional service. True, the recommendation was excluded from Gordon Brown's recent budget as too costly. But it remains as an aspiration in an influential research document which genuinely asked: "What do children need?"

The question was sugarcoated: the aim of the recommendation is described in the report as offering mothers more choice. Asking the question openly is obviously still too controversial, unless you're a hardheaded American academic like Belsky. But in Ireland it is not being asked, at an official level, at all.

The newly established National Children's Office in Ireland has initiated a 10-year research study on the Republic's children. Meanwhile, on foundations of complete ignorance, childcare provision is being built to a design being abandoned in other countries: it's out of date, completely unsuitable for its proposed inhabitants and destined to be painfully and expensively demolished in the years to come.

vwhite@irish-times.ie

Maev-Ann Wren is on leave