Kagan Proposes Day Care Delay

Congress should not fund infant day care centers until training institutes for the staffs can be established, Jerome Kagan, professor of Developmental Psychology, told a session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Kagan yesterday said be favors day care centers but he would "like to see two years of preparation for the program." He cited the Headstart program as an example of an experiment that failed because of inadequate preparation.

Kagan told a symposium on education of the infant and young child that it is essential for ghetto mothers to approve of the arrangements that are made concerning the day care centers.

Need 'Control'

"A sense of control over one's future and a stake in the next days are likely to develop if the parent believes that a specific change is reasonable and that she has the option to choose it," he said.

"It is more important for a parent to believe that a particular change in her practices will help her," Kagan said, "than to have a set of interventions, in which she has no faith, imposed upon her."

Kagan added that it was important that "care and concern go into the preparation of the procedures" to be used with children of infant age. He said that infantscan be hurt much more easily than the pre-school children.

Jean Mayer, professor of Nutrition and White House consultant, told another gathering at the AAAS convention that changes in Federal regulations will soon allow school committees to purchase catered lunches to be given free or sold at reduced rates to school children.

He said that these changes will be important for Boston, where most elementary schools do not have free lunch programs because they have no kitchens and no funds to build them.

At a press conference last week Mayer also said that there was considerable malnutrition among college students. He cited as the cause lack of fresh fruit and excesses of other foods in student diets.