THE GREAT DUMMY DEBATE

Who's the dummy?
Whilst leafing idly through the newspaper I discover that childcare "professionals" are in disaray.

Apparently opinion among those who know what's best for us is greatly divided over the use by children of dummies. Apparently they are believed to delay speech development. From a certain daily paper it appears that tensions in the industry are rising.

I don't know about the science of it but I have never found this to be the case and I come from a long line of dummy users.

Certainly my own children didn't suffer from being allowed a dummy.

Surely common sense dictates that a contented and secure child will progress faster than a stressed one.

Will no one save us from these turbulent "experts"?

We suffer the same stupidity when it comes to learning to read. The old phonetic method was proven to work best as far back as 1950. I had suffered a year of "new method teaching" and learned nothing until the head teacher was replaced and the new one announced that she would have 95% of us reading within six months.

She delivered and most of us were reading red top papers by the age of eight.

Those who had genuine difficulty then had the benefit of more teaching time whilst the rest of us developed our rabble rousing abilities by reading election pamphlets or any other subversive material that we could find.

There seems to be a simple moral here: Ignore the qualified and listen to the experienced.