"Children of the dream" revisited: 70 years of collective early child care in Israeli kibbutzim.

Abstract

This article focuses on kibbutz care for infants and young children.It reviews (a) past and present practices of collective education within the context of its historical background and guiding principles and (b) the results of developmental research regarding the impact of multiple caregiving and group care on children's socioemotional development within the framework of attachment theory.The research results indicate that, from a psychological point of view, collective sleeping is a problematic aspect of kibbutz child rearing.However, group care and multiple caregiving of high quality do not necessarily interfere with the formation of close relationships between parents and children or with the development of social skills.An Israeli kibbutz (pl., kibbutzim) is a cooperative, democratically governed, multigenerational Community with an average population of 400-900 people.Each kibbutz is economically and socially autonomous but is also affiliated with one of three kibbutz organizations called "kibbutz movements" that offer support and guidance to individual kibbutzim.In the past, the kibbutz movements were deeply divided by political and ideological diiferences that were expressed even on the level of child-care practices.With the passage of time, however, most of these differences have lost their significance, and many kibbutz members today favor the idea of establishing a single united kibbutz movement.Every kibbutz member works for the kibbutz economy and is in turn provided by the Community with housing, food, clothing, health and educational Services, recreation, and other living needs.In the past, kibbutzim had been fairly isolated agricultural communities in which living conditions were exceedingly hard.Today kibbutz economies are based on adiversity of Industries and agricultural activities and are able to provide members with a satisfying Standard of living.The kibbutz is known äs being one of the very few utopian experiments that have succeeded in establishing a radically different way of living and of raising children.As many äs four generations have been brought up in kibbutzim since the first such communities were founded at the turn of the Century.The kibbutz child-rearing System, also called collective education, has been treated in the literature äs furnishing a "natural labo-

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